Introduction

Chiara Marletta was a PhD student in Oxford when she discovered David Deutsch's constructor theory. She wanted to understand whether self-reproducing entities like bacteria can use quantum effects to speed up their functionalities. There are some theories about, for example, photosynthetic bacteria that live on the bottom of the sea. Chiara: I think there is this trivial sense in which they do. We haven't had experiments because it's hard to test the system. But I think this is like what motivated quantum biology, which is like an existing field.