I recently finished my physics PhD focused on quantum effects in photosynthesis, and I saw Hameroff and Bandyopadhyay's talks at Google's "Quantum Biology" workshop back in 2010.
These guys live in a bizarre alternate universe where a number of legitimate experimental results and calculations based on real physics add up to striking conclusions with no basis in reality. They are happy to combined many random factoids -- anything that vaguely supports their ideas -- and pretend that the combination is convincing evidence.
For example, the authors hypothesize that the spin of magnetic dipoles could be quantum bits used for information processing in microtubules. As support, they cite experimental evidence for resonances in electrical conductance in microtubules at certain RF frequencies. But coherent motion of electrons is a totally different physical phenomena than coherent spin.
The most amazing thing to me is that these guys do manage to operate in their own parallel academic universe, with their own journals, conferences and (most frighteningly) funding.
As I found out at the Google workshop (which had been basically hijacked by these guys), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has been funding this fellow Bandyopadhyay's experiments that, at the Google conference, he was touting as "experimental evidence for a topological quantum computing in the brain." An AFOSR officer I talked to was very proud about this project. In my view this is basically a criminal misuse of US taxpayer money (probably 100k/year).
No offense, but wasn't your advisor on the FMO complex coherence train for the longest time before they found another chromophore[1] that rendered many coherence projections spurious?
There has been plenty of hype about quantum coherence in photosynthesis, too, which I have played a part in debunking [1]. It is clear (in my opinion) that quantum coherent motion not play a large role in energy transfer in photosynthesis, but I think the jury is still out on whether or not it plays a small role or none at all.
Part of the answer may depend on how "coherence" is defined. I do have a number of objections to the conclusions drawn in the paper discussed in the blog post you link to (about the 8th chromophore). For more details, you can see a paper I wrote a few years ago [2]. I don't agree with the interpretation that "The energy transfer is incoherent in the native complex." This is still a rather large point of contention among scholars in this field.
The differences between quantum computing in the brain and quantum coherence in photosynthesis are actually rather large. There is actual, essentially undisputed evidence for quantum coherence in photosynthesis (in the experiments). There is a real scientific process going on with interactions between experiment/theory. Moreover, the people who did the over-hyped experiments a few years ago that were published in Nature/Science have moved on from claiming it is "quantum computing in biology" when further evidence and analyses came out against it. Hameroff and Penrose seem to be sticking to their original ideas even though they have been thoroughly debunked.
These guys live in a bizarre alternate universe where a number of legitimate experimental results and calculations based on real physics add up to striking conclusions with no basis in reality. They are happy to combined many random factoids -- anything that vaguely supports their ideas -- and pretend that the combination is convincing evidence.
For example, the authors hypothesize that the spin of magnetic dipoles could be quantum bits used for information processing in microtubules. As support, they cite experimental evidence for resonances in electrical conductance in microtubules at certain RF frequencies. But coherent motion of electrons is a totally different physical phenomena than coherent spin.
The most amazing thing to me is that these guys do manage to operate in their own parallel academic universe, with their own journals, conferences and (most frighteningly) funding.
As I found out at the Google workshop (which had been basically hijacked by these guys), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has been funding this fellow Bandyopadhyay's experiments that, at the Google conference, he was touting as "experimental evidence for a topological quantum computing in the brain." An AFOSR officer I talked to was very proud about this project. In my view this is basically a criminal misuse of US taxpayer money (probably 100k/year).