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Nothing novel about this discovery/hypothesis. It is basically a simplified rehash of Gilbert Ling's Association Induction Hypothesis (AIH), which stipulates no membranes for cells and cellular entities as purely phase transition phenomena driven by adsorption of water on proteins/potassium and structured by sunlight. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20070042/ Ling's work was first published in the 1950s and more than 70 years later the untenable theory of cell membranes is still promoted and taught in biology classes, despite being conclusively disproven by Ling, Pollack, Szent-Györgyi (Nobel laurate), etc. Now, we get to hear portions of the AIH effectively getting plagiarized and republished by scientific groups without any reference to the extensive work done by those scientists mentioned above. Well, I guess as long as science is getting on the right track after 70 years of "soul searching", a little plagiarism is worth it, right? https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/fulltext/S0966-842X... "...Gerald Pollack has written a rollicking romp through cell biology that should rock the science. He has taken the principles of physical chemistry and applied them to the fundamental processes of the cell in a lucid explanation of how these ‘engines of life’ might work. To be fair, the experimental science is mostly not his own, but represents his deep understanding and appreciation of the work of people such as Gilbert Ling and Albert Szent Györgyi. If they are collectively correct, this work represents a paradigm shift in cell biology, and Pollack performs a service comparable to the popularization of Copernicus by Galileo. (The author is not shy about the extreme nature of his views and draws his own analogy to the Copernican revolution in the opening paragraphs.) Pollack has hit upon water structuring by proteins and phase changes to explain everything from cell division to muscle contraction, expanding the idea of phase changes to include everything from voltage changes to conformational changes in proteins." |
No it's not - it's a refinement of current theories that is perfectly compatible with the existence of membranes.
FYI, we are still working on the basics. Recently, we found free floating mitochondrias in the blood (outside cells!), and now we have the idea that cells exchange mitochondrias: http://www.sci-news.com/biology/cell-free-mitochondria-human...