Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', died in Paris on three October. He will definitely be remembered for the phrase his work impressed, which has become the title of a play and a rock music, as well as a determine of everyday speech. But his controversial career also highlighted the tricky problem of tips on how to deal with research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself turned intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a star, and it isn't hard to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew how one can wield a rhetorical foil. His discuss of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-style prosecutions' performed well with these inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day Inquisition. He conjured up photographs of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes have been scandalized by a ground-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he suggested, a Newton difficult a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.
Back in 1988, nevertheless, Benveniste was very much part of the establishment. He was the senior director of the French medical research group INSERM's Unit 200, in Clamart, which studied the immunology of allergy and inflammation. That was when he despatched his infamous paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells called basophils, which control the body's reaction to allergens, could be activated to produce an immune response by options of antibodies that have been diluted so far that they contain none of those biomolecules at all. It was as if the water molecules one way or the other retained a memory of the antibodies that they had beforehand been in touch with, in order that a biological impact remained when the antibodies have been no longer current. This, MemoryWave Official it seemed, validated the claims made for extremely diluted homeopathic medicines. After a lengthy assessment course of, wherein the referees insisted on seeing evidence that the effect may very well be duplicated in three different independent laboratories, Nature printed the paper.
Naturally, the paper prompted a sensation. Newsweek. However no one, Memory Wave including Benveniste, gave a lot attention to the crucial query of how such a 'memory' impact might be produced. The concept that water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that final for under about a picosecond (10-12 seconds) earlier than breaking and reforming, may somehow cluster into lengthy-lived mimics of the antibody appeared absurd. Other groups have been subsequently unable to repeat the effect, and the independent outcomes that the reviewers had requested for had been by no means published. Additional experiments carried out by Benveniste's team, in double-blind conditions overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, didn't verify the original outcomes. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-primarily based company he arrange within the wake of the controversy, he devised another clarification for his unusual outcomes. Biomolecules, he said, talk with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic indicators, which the receptors pick up like radios tuned to a particular wavelength.
Benveniste claimed that he was in a position to document these alerts digitally, and that by taking part in them back to cells in the absence of the molecules themselves he may reproduce their biochemical impact, including triggering a defence response in neutrophils, Memory Wave which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, of course, limitless. Why, if that is the way in which biomolecules work, do they trouble with shape complementarity in any respect? How could a molecule act as an antenna for electromagnetic wavelengths of several kilometres? And the way does the memory of water fit into all of this? Benveniste proposes that transmission of the signal by some means includes the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper3 that now appears to be invoked every time water's 'weirdness' is at difficulty - for example, to explain chilly fusion. The small print were not, Benveniste stated, his accountability. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. However his failure to simplify his experimental system so that he could clarify the exact nature of the results he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell in need of rigorous science.