The chemical corner stone of biological
processes
The absence of foundational principles in biophysics, chemistry and biochemistry textbooks used in medical schools has left deuterium biochemistry entirely off the medical profession's radar. This is a tremendous oversight.
Why is water movement so important? A fascinating paper entitled “Water and Life: The Medium is the Message” by Frenkel‑Pinter and colleagues from NASA and Georgia Tech 2021 expands on the role of water in the human body and biology.
1. They define water as the chemical cornerstone of biological processes and challenge the notion or even the possibility of an inert biological solvent.
2. They call water the most frequent and dominant chemical actor in metabolism
3. A given water molecule frequently and repeatedly serves as a reaction substrate, intermediate, cofactor, and product
4. Between ⅓ and ½ of known biochemical reactions involve consumption or production of water.
It is now clear that, in fact, every proton (hydrogen) utilizing biochemical reaction in the body serves to separate hydrogen from deuterium.
Actually, the deuterium story started back in 1931. This is when Professor Urey devised a method for the concentration of any possible heavy hydrogen isotopes by the fractional distillation of liquid hydrogen: this led to the discovery of deuterium. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934.
You may have heard of deuterium in relation to nuclear power plants. Deuterium atoms in high concentration in “heavy” water have indeed been used in reactors because they slow down nuclear reactions, yet their similarly strong biological impacts on enzyme reaction architectures have long been ignored.