Randy Wayne (biologist)


Randy O. Wayne is a plant cell biologist at Cornell University notable for his work on plant development. In particular, along with his colleague Peter K. Hepler, Wayne established the powerful role of calcium in regulating plant growth; accordingly, their 1985 article Calcium and plant development was cited by at least 405 subsequent articles to earn the "Citation Classic" award from Current Contents magazine and has been cited by hundreds more since 1993. He is an authority on how plant cells sense gravity through pressure, on the water permeability of plant membranes, light microscopy, as well as the effects of calcium on plant development. He wrote two textbooks including Plant Cell Biology: From Astronomy to Zoology and Light and Video Microscopy. The second edition of Plant Cell Biology: From Astronomy to Zoology is dedicated to Erwin Chargaff.
In 2010, Wayne proposed a theory of light that is inconsistent with relativity.

Personal Life

Randy Wayne was born to Cynthia and Leonard Wayne in Boston, Massachusetts on May 8, 1955. He has one brother, Scott Wayne. He is married to Amy Allyn Wayne.

Education

Wayne completed his undergraduate studies in Botany at the University of Massachusetts. He earned an M.A. in Biology from the University of California at Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in Plant Cell Biology from the University of Massachusetts in 1985 working under Peter K. Hepler. He was a post-doc at The University of Texas at Austin working with Stanley Roux, Guy Thompson, and H. Y. Lim Tung, and had a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship to work with Masashi Tazawa at the University of Tokyo. While in Japan, Wayne worked at the National Institute of Basic Biology in Okazaki with Akeo Kadota, Masakatsu Watanabe, and Masaki Furuya, Hitotsubashi University in Kunitachi with Eiji Kamitsubo, and the Himeji Institute of Technology with Tetsuro Mimura and Teruo Shimmen. Wayne learned botany from Ed Davis and Edward J. Klekowski, plant anatomy and plant morphology from David W. Bierhorst, James G. Bruce, and Dan B. Walker, plant physiology and plant biochemistry from Bernard Rubinstein, James A. Lockhart, Arthur I. Stern, Burlyn E. Michel, Claud L. Brown, Clanton C. Black, and Park S. Nobel, plant morphogenesis from Otto L. Stein, Seymour Shapiro, Elaine M. Tobin, and Bernard O. Phinney, plant ecology and evolution from David L. Mulcahy, community ecology from Walter Westman, genetics from Bruce R. Levin, cell biology from Peter L. Webster and Elma Gonzalez, cytogenetics from Carl P. Swanson, phycology from W. Marshall Darley, mycology from Melvin S. Fuller, plant taxonomy from Harlan Lewis and Henry J. Thompson, statistics from Ted Emigh, cell motility and light microscopy from Peter K. Hepler, and economic botany from Oswald Tippo. While teaching at Cornell University, Wayne audited plant biochemistry taught by André Jagendorf, Tom Owens, Eloy Rodriguez, and John Thompson, plant chemistry taught by Manuel Aregullin, ion transport taught by Roger M. Spanswick, ion channels taught by Owen Hamill, calculus taught by Thomas Rishel, analog and digital electronics taught by Don McBride, mechanics & heat taught by Maxim Perelstein, introduction to special relativity taught by Al Sievers, electromagnetism taught by Veit Elser, electricity & magnetism taught by André LeClair, intermediate electricity & magnetism taught by Csaba Csaki, oscillations, waves, and quantum Mechanics taught by Tomas Arias, waves and thermal Physics taught by Peter Wittich and Henry Tye, basics of quantum mechanics taught by Georg Hoffstaetter and J. C. Seamus Davis, applications of quantum mechanics taught by Piet Brouwer, introduction to astrophysics taught by Dong Lai, introduction to philosophy taught by Christopher Williams, history of science in Europe: from the ancient legacy to Isaac Newton, and history of science in Europe: Newton to Darwin; Darwin to Einstein taught by Peter Dear, and history of the physical sciences taught by Suman Seth.

Career

Wayne joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1987. He is a member of the CALS School of Integrative Plant Science. He has a deep interest in teaching science and teaches Plant Cell Biology and Light and Video Microscopy. He has taught a course for nonmajors entitled, Biological Principles and subsequently taught a course for nonmajors entitled, Light and Life. Wayne also has strong views on the meaning of a college education. Wayne is a member of the Biology and Society major, which is designed for students who wish to combine training in biology with perspectives from the social sciences and humanities to understand the scientific, social, political, and ethical aspects of modern biology. Wayne is an overseas member of the Lunar Society.

Fern Spore Germination

When it was generally assumed that fern spores contained all the ions necessary for germination, Wayne, working with Peter K. Hepler, showed that external calcium ions were necessary for the red light-stimulated, phytochrome-mediated signal transduction chain that leads to the germination response of the spores of Onoclea sensibilis. Calcium ions are required for the red light-stimulated, phytochrome-mediated signal transduction chains that lead to germination in the spores of other species.

Water Permeability of Plant Cell Membranes

It was generally considered that water moved in and out of the plant cell through the lipid bilayer. Wayne, working with Masashi Tazawa, presented most of the now classical arguments favoring membrane water channels and clearly demonstrated their major contribution to osmotic water transport. Wayne's work preceded the molecular identification of aquaporins in plant cells.

Gravity Sensing in Plant Cells

It is generally believed that the sedimentation of starch-containing plastids, known as amyloplasts, is responsible for gravity-sensing in plant cells. However, based on the facts that plant cells that do not contain sedimenting amyloplasts still sense gravity and that starchless mutants in higher plants are almost as sensitive to gravity as the wild-type plants, Wayne, working with Mark P. Staves and A. Carl Leopold proposed that the amyloplasts do not act as gravity sensors, but as a ballast to enhance the gravitational pressure sensed by proteins at the plasma membrane–extracellular matrix junction.

Plant Development and the Arrow of Time

It is a commonplace that plant development is not reversible in time. For example, two daughter cells never go through a reverse mitosis to merge into one mother cell; four pollen grains never go through a reverse meiosis to merge into a pollen mother cell; ejected fern spores never reassemble in a sporangium; and oak trees never recede into an acorn. The irreversibility of plant development is inconsistent with the fundamental laws of physics, which are symmetrical with respect to time and predict that all events are fundamentally reversible. Wayne has shown that the inconsistency between the botanical view and the physical view is a result of temperature being an outsider in the laws of motion given by Newton and Einstein and that this oversight is the source of the predictions of time-reversal-invariance or T-symmetry made by these two great systems of motion. Neglecting temperature in the laws of motion is tantamount to assuming that events take place at absolute zero. Consequently, Wayne claims that the laws of motion are only perfectly valid at absolute zero. By taking into consideration Planck’s law of blackbody radiation that incorporates temperature into the laws of motion and the Doppler effect, Wayne has shown that photons in the environment through which any particle with a charge and/or a magnetic moment moves, act as a source of temperature-dependent radiation friction on everything from elementary particles to galaxies. Because this radiation- or optomechanical-friction is universal and inevitable at any temperature above absolute zero, no real systems are ever conservative, and temperature can no longer be an outsider in a fundamental and irreducible law of motion. Thus the inconsistency between the observations by botanists and the fundamental laws of physics is settled in favor of the worldview of botanists.
Wayne has defined the change of entropy in irreversible systems at constant temperature in terms of the optomechanical friction that occurs as a result of any motion that takes place above absolute zero. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the change of entropy is greater than zero for spontaneous processes, is explained by electromagnetic interactions between charged particles and the Doppler-shifted photons through which they move. Because the Doppler-shifted photons move away from the particles at the speed of light, the change of entropy, as defined by Wayne, is not subject to the Poincaré recurrence theorem. Consequently, Wayne concludes that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a fundamental law of nature rather than a statistical law of physics. This conclusion, which is consistent with the routine experience of botanists, supports the idea that the arrow of time is fundamentally real and inevitable, that every instant of time is unique.

Light and Plant Development

Light is fundamental to plant development as well as photosynthesis. Light, absorbed by phytochrome, cryptochrome, photopsin, and other photoreceptor pigments, acts as a signal for the germination of many seeds and spores, for the development of seedlings, and for the initiation of flowering. Light-mediated development is known as photomorphogenesis. The current model of light in terms of a mathematical point-like photon or an infinite plane wave is not helpful in understanding how light influences plant development. Wayne claims that the fundamental unit of light is not an elementary particle but a composite entity known as a binary photon that is composed of a particle of matter and its conjugate antiparticle. These semiphotons rotate around the axis of propagation in the transverse plane as they oscillate and translate along the axis of propagation.
When the semiphotons are assigned equal and opposite mass, charge, and sense of rotation, which make the binary photons massless and electrically neutral, they generate a transverse electric field and a magnetic field within the binary photon that is orthogonal to and a quarter wave out of phase with the electric field. The electromagnetic fields function to eject an electron in a given photoreceptor pigment from the ground state to the excited state and to rotate the bonds in long wavelength photoreceptors like phytochrome.
Wayne has developed wave functions that represent the paths of the semiphotons in Euclidean space and Newtonian time. The transverse wave functions are solutions to the Schrödinger equation that has been modified to directly operate on bosons as opposed to fermions, and the longitudinal wavefunctions are solutions to the classical equations of mechanics. These fields, unlike the fields described by Maxwell’s equations, are consistent with the assumptions of the Kirchhoff's diffraction equation.
Wayne’s wave mechanical approach shows that the binary photon can be visualized as an oscillating particulate rotor propagating electromagnetic waves through Euclidean space and Newtonian time at the invariant vacuum speed of light. While quantum mechanical calculations typically agree with experience while being at odds with ordinary concepts of trajectories in space and time, the wave mechanical calculations carried out by Wayne agree with experience without conflicting with the ordinary concepts of space and time. In contrast to the claims of Heisenberg and Born, the mathematical description of the quantized binary photon presented by Wayne is consistent with the Anschaulichkeit, picturability, or imaged facts of classical physics sought by Einstein.

Gravity and Plant Development

Gravity is fundamental to plant development. The gravitational force, sensed by a gravity receptor that is composed of a comparator that senses compression at the bottom of the cell and tension at the top of a cell, acts a signal for plants so that the shoot grows up and the roots grow down. This response to gravity is known as gravitropism. The current model of gravity in terms of an action at a distance by a pulling force or the warping of space-time is not helpful in understanding how gravity influences plant development. Wayne claims that the fundamental unit of gravity is not an elementary particle but a composite entity known as a binary photon that is composed of a particle of matter and its conjugate antiparticle. Unlike the binary photons with wavelengths in the visible range that interact with low mass electrons of matter, the binary photons that carry the gravitational force have extremely long wavelengths and interact with the high mass baryons in the nuclei of matter. As in the case of nuclear magnetic resonance, it is the long wavelength binary photons that interact with the heavy nuclear particles. Wayne equates these long wavelength binary photons with gravitons; both of which are carriers of forces that obey the inverse square law. The gravitons fill the universe. Wayne claims that they act on matter not by exerting a pulling force but by exerting a pushing force, just as light does. The idea that gravity acts as a pushing force had been proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, Georges-Louis Le Sage, and others. According to Wayne, the gravitons coming from the direction of the earth are scattered before they reach a plant whereas the gravitons coming from the direction of the sky are not scattered away as much. The plant gravitational sensor responds to the differential number of gravitons coming from the opposite directions of the sky and the earth. The differential graviton density exerts a downward force on the mass of the plant cell. This gravitational pressure activates the gravitational receptors at the plasma membrane-extracellular matrix junction, which results in the plant’s observed response to gravity.

Books