Number 192 (Story #2), August 30, 1994 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein COULD QUANTUM MECHANICS PLAY A ROLE in the workings of the conscious mind? Some physicists, like John Taylor of Kings College London, hold the negative view: they believe that information born at the quantum level would be overwhelmed in the warm, wet, and noisy environment of living cells. By contrast, other scientists, such as Stuart Hameroff of the University of Arizona, assert that under some circumstances quantum information could indeed be sustained at the cellular level. Hameroff points to microtubules, tiny rodlike proteins (only discovered in the 1970s) existing in all bodily cells, as a possible theater of quantum consciousness. These rods, according to Hameroff, might possibly serve either as waveguides for photons or as the host medium for persistent vibrational standing waves. In this model the action of many rods in neighboring cells, acting in concert, would constitute a physical matrix for thoughts or memories. All these ideas were discussed earlier this year at a conference held in Arizona. At the conference partisans of the quantum approach were a small minority. Even scientists who gave some credence to the quantum hypotheses had to admit that experimental searches for coherent effects in microtubule behavior had found nothing. (New Scientist, 20 August.)