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 inspired, MemoryWave Official which has change into the title of a play and a rock tune, in addition to a determine of everyday speech. However his controversial profession additionally highlighted the tricky subject of how to deal with research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself grew to become intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a star, and it's not arduous to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew how you can wield a rhetorical foil. His talk of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-style prosecutions' performed properly with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day Inquisition. He conjured up photos of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a floor-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he steered, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.

Again in 1988, nevertheless, Benveniste was very much a part of the establishment. 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 sent his infamous paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells known as basophils, which management the body's reaction to allergens, will be activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies that have been diluted thus far that they include none of those biomolecules in any respect. It was as if the water molecules someway retained a memory of the antibodies that they had beforehand been involved with, in order that a biological effect remained when the antibodies were no longer current. This, it appeared, validated the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines. After a prolonged overview process, during which the referees insisted on seeing proof that the impact might be duplicated in three other unbiased laboratories, Nature published the paper.

Naturally, the paper brought about a sensation. Newsweek. However nobody, including Benveniste, Memory Wave gave much consideration to the important question of how such a 'memory' effect could possibly be produced. The idea that water molecules, related by hydrogen bonds that last for only a few picosecond (10-12 seconds) before breaking and reforming, could one way or MemoryWave Official the other cluster into lengthy-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd. Different teams were subsequently unable to repeat the impact, and the unbiased results that the reviewers had asked for were never revealed. Additional experiments carried out by Benveniste's group, in double-blind circumstances overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, did not 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 set up in the wake of the controversy, he devised another clarification for his strange results. Biomolecules, he said, talk with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic signals, which the receptors choose up like radios tuned to a particular wavelength.

Benveniste claimed that he was in a position to file these indicators digitally, and Memory Wave that by enjoying them again to cells within the absence of the molecules themselves he could reproduce their biochemical effect, together with triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, of course, endless. Why, if that is the way in which biomolecules work, do they trouble with shape complementarity at all? How might 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 somehow involves the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper3 that now appears to be invoked each time water's 'weirdness' is at difficulty - for instance, to explain chilly fusion. The main points weren't, Benveniste said, his responsibility. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. But his failure to simplify his experimental system so that he may make clear the precise nature of the results he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell wanting rigorous science.

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Pub: 10 Sep 2025 16:14 UTC

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