There is a word that Western science took a century to take seriously: light. Not the external light that enters through the eyes. The light that your body produces, from within, all the time.
Every cell in your body emits light. Real, measurable light, in wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to infrared. Light so faint that special equipment is needed to detect it. But light nonetheless.
That light has a name: biophotons. And understanding what they are, how they travel, and what information they carry completely changes the way we think about the body.
The discovery no one wanted to hear about
In 1923, a Russian embryologist named Alexander Gurwitsch conducted a simple experiment. He placed two germinating onions, separated by a quartz crystal. He observed that the root of one accelerated its growth according to what was happening in the other, even though there was no physical contact or shared chemistry.
He proposed that cells emitted some kind of ultra-weak radiation that communicated information. He called it mitogenetic radiation. The science of his time, focused on biochemistry, ignored him.
Nearly sixty years later, a German physicist named Fritz-Albert Popp, at the University of Marburg, developed the technology needed to measure what Gurwitsch had intuited. Using highly sensitive photomultiplier tubes in completely dark chambers, he documented that every living cell emits light. Not much. A few photons per second per square centimeter. But coherent, constant, measurable light.
Popp called them biophotons. He founded the International Institute of Biophysics in Neuss, Germany, and brought together nineteen institutions from thirteen countries to study them. What they found changed the map.
It's not accidental light. It's a communication system.
At first, it was thought that the light emitted by cells was a thermal byproduct of metabolism, like the waste heat of a machine. Popp proved that it was not.
The light emitted by cells is coherent. That is, its particles are synchronized in time and space, like those of a low-intensity laser. This coherence is mathematically incompatible with thermal randomness. It requires an organized source.
Measurements showed that biophotonic emissions follow a Poisson distribution, characteristic of coherent systems. In healthy organisms, the pattern is rhythmic, stable, and ordered. In diseased organisms, the pattern becomes chaotic.
Popp proposed that biophotons are a communication system. Cells coordinate their activity not only through chemical signals, but also through light signals. Extremely fast. Precise. Coherent.
He also proposed something more radical: that DNA functions like an antenna that emits and receives this light. The genome wouldn't just be a chemical instruction manual. It would be a resonant system that also operates at the light level.
Fascia as the body's fiber optic cable
This is where a piece comes in that integrates Popp's work with clinical anatomy.
Collagen, the protein that forms the main structure of your fascia, tendons, ligaments, bones, and a significant part of your extracellular matrix, has a property that few 20th-century biologists took seriously: it's a liquid crystal. That is, it has an ordered structure similar to that of crystals, but with the fluidity of a liquid. And like all liquid crystals, it can transmit and modulate light.
Mae-Wan Ho and David Knight, in a study published in the American Journal of Chinese Medicine, documented the crystalline-liquid properties of connective tissue collagen and its ability to transmit light signals. Subsequent research, published in journals such as the Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine and the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, has confirmed that collagen fibers function as waveguides—biological optical fibers—transmitting biophotons throughout the body with minimal signal loss.
Fascia, that connective tissue that envelops every muscle, every organ, every nerve, every blood vessel, forms a continuous network from the surface of the skin to the interior of every cell. And that network isn't just mechanical. It's also luminous.
Your fascia conducts light.
The work of Bordoni and Marelli reviews the evidence that fascia emits and transmits biophotons in a rhythmic oscillatory pattern. The authors propose that this system constitutes a form of cellular and systemic communication that manual therapists have been unknowingly influencing for decades.
What you touch when you work with your hands on a body is not just structure. It is a networked system of light information.
The coincidence with the Chinese meridians
One of the most extraordinary findings of Popp's group came from a collaboration with the German physician Klaus Peter Schlebusch. Using highly sensitive infrared imaging cameras, they documented that the channels through which biophotons preferentially propagate in the human body coincide precisely with the meridian system described by Chinese medicine more than two thousand years ago.
It was published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2005.
What the ancients called qi, circulating through invisible channels, is now measurable as currents of light information transmitted through the fascial network. Chinese medicine was not describing a metaphor. It was describing a real system of coherent light transmission that took Western science millennia to be able to measure.
And what acupuncture does, in this interpretation, is modulate strategic points of a biological fiber-optic system. Nodes where the signal can be amplified, redirected, or rebalanced.
Light coherence and health
In the 1980s and 1990s, Popp measured the biophotonic emissions of patients with different conditions. What he found is that the coherence of the emitted light correlates with the organism's state of health.
In cancer patients, the emission slowed down. Coherence decreased. It was as if the cells had stopped communicating with each other. The internal fiber-optic system was shutting down.
In patients with multiple sclerosis, he found the opposite. The emissions were excessively ordered, rigid. An excess of coherence that blocked the system's flexibility.
In both cases, the illness appeared as a dysregulation of the internal light system. Neither too much chaos nor too much order. Health is a dynamic pattern of oscillating coherence.
This idea, radical for conventional medicine, aligns with what all ancient medical traditions have been affirming for centuries: health is balance in motion. And what is balanced, at this level, is light.
What does this mean for a human body?
By integrating all the layers, a different image of the body begins to emerge.
You are not just flesh and chemistry. You are a light transmission system. A network of crystalline collagen fibers that conducts biophotons with measurable coherence. DNA that operates as an antenna. Fascia that is simultaneously a mechanical envelope, a shock absorber, a sensor, and a biological optical fiber. A light pattern that corresponds to the channels described by Chinese medicine two thousand years ago.
Every emotion, every internal state, modifies the coherence of this light. Every chronic tension blocks transmission in a sector of the network. Every fascial release, every regulation of the nervous system, every state of presence, restores the signal's fluidity.
That's why mindful manual work isn't just biomechanical. That's why coherent breathing isn't just physiological. That's why regulating the nervous system isn't just neurological.
All of these are interventions on a system that transmits information by light.
One last thing
The next time you feel a sense of openness after a session where someone has worked your body with presence and precision, don't just think about muscles that have loosened up or circulation that has been reactivated.
Think also of information that has started circulating again. Of light that has regained its rhythm. Of a biological fiber-optic network that has resumed coherent transmission.
Because that is, literally, what has happened.
And what your body has been doing all along, without you even knowing it.
Sources and references
Bordoni, B., Marelli, F., Morabito, B., & Castagna, R. (2018). Emission of Biophotons and Adjustable Sounds by the Fascial System: Review and Reflections for Manual Therapy. Journal of Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine.
Gurwitsch, A. G. (1923). Die Natur des spezifischen Erregers der Zellteilung. Archive für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen.
Ho, M.W., & Knight, D.P. (1998). The acupuncture system and the liquid crystalline collagen fibers of the connective tissues. American Journal of Chinese Medicine.
Popp, F. A. (2003). Properties of biophotons and their theoretical implications. Indian Journal of Experimental Biology.
Popp, FA, & Beloussov, LV (Eds.). (2003). Integrative Biophysics: Biophotonics. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Popp, F.A., Schlebusch, K.P., & Maric-Oehler, W. (2005). Biophotonics in the infrared spectral range reveal acupuncture meridian structure of the body. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Tang, R., & Dai, J. (2014). Biophoton signal transmission and processing in the brain. Journal of Photochemistry and Photobiology.
Van Wijk, R., & Van Wijk, E.P.A. (2005). An Introduction to Human Biophoton Emission. Forschende Komplementärmedizin und Klassische Naturheilkunde.