[carbocation]

This is a bit of a tangent (that the author takes): “But during protein assembly, each amino acid must be chosen from a soup of 20 different options. Grover’s algorithm explains these numbers: a three-step quantum search can find an object in a database containing up to 20 kinds of entry. Again, 20 is the optimal number.”

20 is the number of amino acids, but this is ignoring stop codons (and specialized amino acids used for initiation).

It’s not super clear to me at what level of abstraction the search is taking place - it can’t be the tRNA space because that’s not just 20 options.

The point that electrons seem to follow a Grover search is cool. I’m just unclear on whether the biological part holds up.

[jerf]

I'd go farther; I can't even imagine in what way matching a codon to a physical amino acid and attaching it to a protein in progress is a "database lookup" in a Grover database lookup.

If proteins were created by the cells by selecting proteins out of quantum superpositions of all the possible amino acids, sure. But that doesn't seem to remotely describe how that process works.