INTRODUCTION

Magnetobiology is a new multidisciplinary domain with contributions coming from fields as diverse as physics and medicine. Its mainstay, however, is biophysics. Magnetobiology has only received a remarkable impetus in the recent two decades. At the same time magnetobiology is a subject matter that during the above relatively long time span failed to receive a satisfactory explanation. There is still no magnetobiological theory, or rather its general physical treatments, or predictive theoretical models. This is all due to the paradoxical nature of the biological action of weak low-frequency magnetic fields, whose energy is incomparable by far with the characteristic energy of biochemical transformations. This all makes the very existence of the domain quite dubious with most of the scientific community, despite a wealth of experimental evidence.

A large body of observational evidence gleaned over years strongly suggests that some electromagnetic fields pose a potential hazard to human health and are a climatic factor that is of no less significance than temperature, pressure, and humidity. As more and more scientists become aware of that fact, studies of the mechanisms of the biological action of electromagnetic fields become an increasingly more topical issue.

There being no biological magnetoreceptors in nature, it is important to perceive the way in which the signal of a magnetic field is transformed into a response of a biological system. A low-frequency magnetic field permeates a living matter without any apparent hindrances. It affects all the particles of the tissue, but not all of the particles are involved in the process of the transferring of information about the magnetic field to the biological level. Primary processes of the interaction of a magnetic field with matter particles, such as electrons, atoms, and molecules, are purely physical processes. Charged particles of living matter, ions, that take part in biophysical and biochemical processes seem to be intermediaries in the transfer of magnetic field signals to the next biochemical level. Such a subtle regulation of the activity of proteins of enzyme type, affected via biophysical mechanisms involving interim ions, shifts the metabolic processes. Beginning with that level one can gauge the action of a magnetic field from the changes in metabolic product densities.

The biological effects of a magnetic field are often observed from the life-support parameters and the behavior of individuals and populations. Experiments, as a rule, boil down to the observation of relations between an external magnetic field and the biological effects it causes. Intermediary levels of the organization of a living system, such as biophysical, biochemical, and physiological ones, appear to lie outside the experimental range, but anyway they affect the experimental results. We thus end up having a kind of a cause-and-effect black box with properties beyond our control. This does not allow any cause–effect relations to be worked out completely. At the same time, there is no practical way to observe the result of the action of weak magnetic fields at the level of individual biochemical reactions or biophysical structures using physical or chemical methods. Magnetobiology is thus fraught with practical difficulties caused by the fact that it necessarily combines issues of physics, biophysics, biochemistry, and biology.

In addition to an analytical review of magnetobiological studies, the book also provides the first detailed description of the effect of the interference of quantum ion states within protein cavities. Using the Schrödinger and Pauli equations, a treatment is given of ion dynamics for idealized conditions and for parallel magnetic fields, as well as for a series of other combinations of magnetic and electric fields. The treatment takes into consideration the ion nuclear spin and the non-linear response of a protein to the redistribution of ion probability density. Formulas are obtained for the magnetic-field-dependent component of the dissociation probability for an ion–protein complex. The principal formula that gives possible magnetobiological effects in parallel DC HDC and AC HAC magnetic fields has the form1

Here m is the magnetic quantum number, Δm = m — m’, Ξ = TΩc is a dimensionless parameter that depends on the properties of an ion–protein complex, ωc = qHDC/Mc is the cyclotron frequency of an ion, f’ = ω/ωs and h’ = HAC/HDC are the dimensionless frequency and amplitude of the variable components of a magnetic field, and Jn is the nth order Bessel function. The elements amm’ are constant coefficients that define the initial conditions for an ion to stay in a cavity. The natural frequency and amplitude interference spectra are worked out for a wide variety of magnetic conditions, including those of pulsed magnetic fields (MFs), for a “magnetic vacuum”, subjected to natural rotations of macromolecules, etc. They show a high level of agreement with available experimental data.

The interference of quantum states of the molecules rotating inside protein cavities, i.e., the interference of molecular gyroscopes, is considered. The properties of molecular gyroscopes are a consistent basis for explaining the physical mechanism of the non-thermal resonance-like biological effects of EMFs, and for solving the so-called “kT problem”.