Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', died in Paris on 3 October. He will definitely be remembered for the phrase his work impressed, which has change into the title of a play and a rock tune, in addition to a figure of everyday speech. However his controversial career also highlighted the tricky challenge of easy methods to deal with research on the fringes of science, a query with which Nature itself turned intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a celebrity, Memory Wave and it isn't exhausting to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew find out how to wield a rhetorical foil. His speak of witch-hunts, Memory Wave scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-type prosecutions' played effectively with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, fashionable-day Inquisition. He conjured up photographs of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes have been scandalized by a floor-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he instructed, a Newton difficult a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.

Back in 1988, Memory Wave nonetheless, Benveniste was very a lot a part of the institution. He was the senior director of the French medical analysis group INSERM's Unit 200, in Clamart, which studied the immunology of allergy and inflammation. That was when he despatched his notorious paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells called basophils, which management the physique's reaction to allergens, can be activated to supply an immune response by solutions of antibodies which have been diluted to this point that they comprise none of those biomolecules in any respect. It was as if the water molecules one way or Memory Wave the other retained a memory of the antibodies that they'd beforehand been involved with, in order that a biological impact remained when the antibodies have been not present. This, it appeared, validated the claims made for extremely diluted homeopathic medicines. After a prolonged overview process, wherein the referees insisted on seeing evidence that the impact may very well be duplicated in three different impartial laboratories, Nature revealed the paper.

Naturally, the paper brought on a sensation. Newsweek. But nobody, including Benveniste, gave much consideration to the crucial query of how such a 'Memory Wave' effect might be produced. The concept water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for under a couple of picosecond (10-12 seconds) earlier than breaking and reforming, may by some means cluster into lengthy-lived mimics of the antibody appeared absurd. Different teams were subsequently unable to repeat the impact, and the impartial results that the reviewers had asked for have been by no means revealed. Additional experiments carried out by Benveniste's crew, 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, Memory Wave the Paris-based firm he set up within the wake of the controversy, he devised one other clarification for his unusual outcomes. Biomolecules, he said, Memory Wave communicate with their receptor Memory Wave molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic signals, which the receptors choose up like radios tuned to a selected wavelength.

Benveniste claimed that he was capable of record these alerts digitally, and that by enjoying them back to cells within the absence of the molecules themselves he might reproduce their biochemical effect, including triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2.

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Pub: 23 Nov 2025 04:22 UTC

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