Biological implications of possible unattainability of comprehensive, molecular-resolution, real-time, volume imaging of the living cell

Abstract

Despite the impressive advances in biological imaging, no imaging modality today generates, in a comprehensive manner, high-resolution images of crowded molecules working deep inside the living cell in real time. In this paper, instead of tackling this engineering problem in the hope of solving it, we ask a converse question: What if such imaging is \emph{fundamentally} impossible? We argue that certain decoherence processes could be suppressed because the internal workings of the cell are not being closely "observed" in the quantum mechanical sense, as implied by the assumed impossibility of imaging. It is certainly true that the "wet and warm" living cell should not exhibit quantum behavior merely because of the lack of observation. Despite this, we plow ahead to see what \emph{might} result from such absence of the outward flow of information. We suggest that chaotic dynamics in the cell could be quantum mechanically suppressed --- a known phenomenon in quantum chaology, which is potentially resistant to various mechanisms for the emergence of classicality. We also consider places where experimental evidence for/against such a possibility may be sought.