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Comment by rudolf0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know enough about neuroscience to determine if this is a possible genius revelation or quackery or somewhere in between. Any scientists willing to comment?

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I'm in the same position as you, but I checked one especially interesting claim near the beginning: "We know that organelles, such as mitochondria, are transferred from neuron to neuron. This presents a challenge to any doctrine based on discrete parts." This is supported by a ref to a paper on mitochondria being transferred from neurons to glia for autophagy, i.e. disposal. This makes the original sentence seem misleading to me, or at least lazy about finding a reference to similar transfers that are more functionally central. This makes me less interested in understanding the rest of the article.

I did a quick search and found this: http://physiologyonline.physiology.org/content/28/6/414

  > First, in vitro intercellular organelle transfer has been described in a highly diverse 
  > assortment of cell types, including human and rodent, differentiated and multipotent, 
  > malignant and benign, epithelial and mesenchymal, and neuronal. Thus it is safe to 
  > conclude that the capability of one cell to donate or receive an organelle from another 
  > cell is clearly widespread throughout mammalian cell types in culture.

Stressed cells being rescued from apoptosis by organelle transfer through tunneling nanotubes (TNTs):

http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v22/n7/full/cdd2014211a.ht...

  > Further studies demonstrated that microtubule-containing TNTs were formed by stressed cells, 
  > which had lost cytochrome c but did not enter into the execution phase of apoptosis 
  > characterized by caspase-3 activation. Moreover, mitochondria colocalized with microtubules in 
  > TNTs and transited along these structures from healthy to stressed cells.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43835/...

Thanks Noseshine for your supporting links. No need for imagination, it's all very well documented. Some of the recent studies of transfer to and from healthy neurons have been weakly critiqued earlier this year, while others, for example showing that mitochondrial transfer through the formation of syncytial networks is ESSENTIAL for the survival of glioblastoma in the brain seem fairly indisputable.

I skimmed it and figured it was quackery, but I didn't dig in deep enough to find the invalidating errors.

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