The piece[1] from John Preskill linked in the article has less fluff and is more informative, IMO.
Given Preskill is director of the IQIM, and Fisher is on its faculty, he may have a promotional agenda; but he has an impressive pedigree[2] - I don't have the knowledge to directly evaluate the hypothesis myself, but if Preskill considers it worth investigating, I'd refrain from betting that it's nonsense!
I just watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku6jVUJONZAm which is a recent lecture in which Matthew Fisher goes into some detail for a predominantly physics theorist audience. He doesn't actually finish his whole talk, but what he does cover is still pretty interesting to me as someone just trying to follow along with my rudimentary recollections of college quantum mechanics.
So {ortho,para}-pyrophospate is a big part of his grand hypothesis. This is analogous to {ortho,para}-water, something I hadn't heard about but which is apparently pretty famous, except with phosphorous instead of hydrogen. And as part of discussing this he mentions a study, presumably http://www.biophys.ru/archive/h2o-00011.pdf, that claims that passing water vapour through charcoal can change the ortho/para ratio from the normal 3:1 to 12:1 and then down to 2:1 for hours. That's just amazing to me, that liquid water can effectively remember a prior interaction for hours. Like that Japanese crank scientist's claims about water memorizing poetry or something, but, you know, actually real.
Fischer's proposed explanation is that ortho-water (and orth-pyrophospate) can't "sit still" because of the way that the aligned nuclear spins of the hydrogen (phosphorus) atoms cause the angular momentum to be quantized in a way that locks the angular velocity to be non-zero. And that discourages the ortho-molecule from being adsorbed or participating in catalysis -- measurable things which can clearly have biological effects. And from the nuclear spin, which is otherwise very long lived!
That's just crazy! Metastable water lasting for hours? I just smiled.
The other stuff may even be a red herring, but even this basic idea is so exciting if true. Here's a suggestive quote from the Russian article:
> Ortho and para water are expected to have notably different physical-chemical properties and, like ortho and para hydrogen, have different magnetic properties. The absence of the magnetic moment in para modification implies its complete insensitivity to the magnetic field, which could be of use in magnetic resonance imaging. The OP separation procedure realized is quite straightforward and may occur in nature—in soil, atmosphere, living organisms, and cosmic objects. The scope and the role of this phenomenon are yet to be studied.
Given Preskill is director of the IQIM, and Fisher is on its faculty, he may have a promotional agenda; but he has an impressive pedigree[2] - I don't have the knowledge to directly evaluate the hypothesis myself, but if Preskill considers it worth investigating, I'd refrain from betting that it's nonsense!
1: https://quantumfrontiers.com/2015/11/06/wouldnt-you-like-to-...
2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Preskill