While I have no personal experience with either treatment the OP's article is supporting, I feel there are a few quotes from the article that are
rather telling:
The researchers found that cancer cell death was initiated by telomere erosion and completed through mitotic catastrophe events (Pathak et al.,
2003)
This entire sentence, and I suspect others, as well, was plagiarized from the source they cited in parenthesis. Citing a source does not give license
to plagiarize. If the author could not be bothered to summarize or rephrase information from a source, it's doubtful if any of the following research
was original or thorough.
mtDNA is less protected from damage than nuclear DNA, and thus is more susceptible to mutations.
Not true. The fact that the mitochondria contain several copies of the genome make it
less susceptible to mutation. This is the basis of
mitochondrial ancestry testing. If the mitochondrial genome were constantly mutating, as the author of the article suggests, the haplogroups we know
today would not exist, but would instead be millions splintered groups.
One theory is that the C150T mutation shifts the site at which mitochondrial DNA starts to replicate, thus allowing the individual to replace
damaged molecules faster.
False. The c150t mutation restructure the origin of replication, it does not move it. If the origin were moved, it would interrupt normal gene
transcription. The current, and apparently only, model of how this mutation benefits the individual is that it allows for tighter nuclear control of
the mitochondrial genome.
Source
Also, the author feels that the fact three of five mice survived a seemingly lethal dose of cancerous cells is enough to claim success. However, there
is no description of any genotyping being done on the mice. They give the species information, but did not perform genotype analysis, a common
procedure when testing the efficacy of genetic treatment in an animal model.
This study was not performed under strict scientific conditions, nor does it provide any true insight into the true worth of these treatments.
