The Memory Of Water : Nature News
Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'Memory Wave Audio of water', died in Paris on three October. He will definitely be remembered for the phrase his work inspired, which has change into the title of a play and a rock tune, in addition to a figure of on a regular basis speech. But his controversial profession additionally highlighted the tricky situation of how you can deal with research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself grew to become intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a celebrity, and it isn't hard to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew easy methods to wield a rhetorical foil. His discuss of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-model prosecutions' performed well with these inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day Inquisition. He conjured up pictures of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a ground-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he urged, a Newton difficult a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.
Back in 1988, however, Benveniste was very a lot part of the institution. He was the senior director of the French medical research organization INSERM's Unit 200, in Clamart, which studied the immunology of allergy and inflammation. That was when he sent his infamous paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells referred to as basophils, which control the body's reaction to allergens, could be activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies which were diluted to date that they contain none of these biomolecules at all. It was as though the water molecules by some means retained a memory of the antibodies that they had beforehand been involved with, in order that a biological impact remained when the antibodies had been no longer present. This, it seemed, validated the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines. After a lengthy overview course of, in which the referees insisted on seeing proof that the effect may very well be duplicated in three other impartial laboratories, Nature printed the paper.
Naturally, the paper triggered a sensation. Newsweek. But nobody, including Benveniste, gave much consideration to the important query of how such a 'memory' effect may very well be produced. The concept water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for less than a couple of picosecond (10-12 seconds) earlier than breaking and reforming, could someway cluster into long-lived mimics of the antibody appeared absurd. Other groups were subsequently unable to repeat the impact, and the independent outcomes that the reviewers had asked for have been never revealed. Further experiments carried out by Benveniste's team, in double-blind circumstances overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, failed to confirm the unique results. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-primarily based firm he arrange in the wake of the controversy, he devised another rationalization for his unusual results. Biomolecules, he said, communicate with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic alerts, which the receptors pick up like radios tuned to a selected wavelength.
Benveniste claimed that he was in a position to report these indicators digitally, and that by taking part in them back to cells within the absence of the molecules themselves he may reproduce their biochemical impact, together with triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, of course, countless. Why, if that is the best way biomolecules work, do they trouble with form complementarity in any respect? How could a molecule act as an antenna for electromagnetic wavelengths of a number of kilometres? And the way does the memory of water match into all of this? Benveniste proposes that transmission of the signal someway entails the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper3 that now seems to be invoked whenever water's 'weirdness' is at challenge - for example, to explain chilly fusion. The small print were not, Memory Wave Audio Benveniste mentioned, his duty. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. However his failure to simplify his experimental system so that he may clarify the exact nature of the consequences he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell short of rigorous science.