Will quantum physics help us cure Alzheimer's disease?

The theories behind black holes generally suggest that subatomic particles (electrons, protons, neutrons) are themselves black holes, in which time expands in the opposite direction of our proper (perceived) time. Huge amounts of information could be stored by the spin number of photons present in these particle black holes. Could it be possible that the organization of brain matter, in terms of the properties of subatomic particles (quantum mechanics), confers on brain matter the capacities of memory and cognition, and that these phenomena are not encountered in other types of matter structure in the human body?

Come again? I was not familiar with electrons, protons and neutrons being black holes. But even if they are, I fail to see their direct relevance to understanding memory and cognition. Sure, it's a trivial fact that it's a very specific organization of subatomic particles that leads to a brain rather than to a liver or a chair. But the real action all takes place at the level of aggregates of these particles which we call molecules. I get the feeing that Kraus is indulging in a classic reductionist fallacy here. While subatomic particles do constitute the brain, understanding the brain can only come at a higher level, that of rather old-fashioned physics and chemistry involving ionic currents and neurotransmitters.

But Kraus finds a valuable place for quantum physicists in the war on neurodegenerative disorders:

To me it has become mandatory to create an AD scientific community that includes not only medicinal chemists, pharmacologists, biologists, and medical doctors, but also quantum physicists, in order to understand how aging alters the intimate structure of brain matter, where memory and cognition are located, with the hope of finding new AD treatment research orientations.

To me this sounds suspiciously like Roger Penrose's argument in his rather startling book "Shadows of the Mind" in which he postulated a relationship between wavefunction superposition in quantum mechanics and the growth and shrinkage of microtubules as significantly contributing to consciousness. Even a cursory look at that argument raised serious doubts about the relevance of quantum behavior in microtubules and more formal analysis seemed to confirm these doubts. I am not saying that physicists won't be a valuable asset on a drug discovery team, it's just that they are probably not going to use the tools of quantum gravity to map out cognitive pathways anytime soon.

Somewhat ironically, Kraus ends his piece by extolling the role of a systems biology approach in addressing a problem as complex as Alzheimer's disease. With this I wholeheartedly agree, but systems biology is the opposite of reductionism, where new emergent phenomena provide causal explanations that cannot be reduced to the laws underlying their substrates. We do need a suite of analytical tools operating at various hierarchical levels to address the issue, but given enough time and smart people, we should be able to do the job using standard chemistry and biology, albeit at a more sophisticated level. No fancy biophoton entanglement may be necessary.