The Memory Of Water : Nature Information

De Transcription | Bibliothèque patrimoniale numérique Mines ParisTech
Aller à : navigation, rechercher


Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'Memory Wave Program 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 figure of on a regular basis speech. However his controversial career additionally highlighted the difficult difficulty of methods to deal with analysis on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself turned intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a celebrity, and it's not onerous to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew learn how to wield a rhetorical foil. His talk of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-fashion prosecutions' performed nicely with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, trendy-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 challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.



Back in 1988, nonetheless, Benveniste was very much part of the institution. 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 sent his notorious paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells called basophils, which management the body's reaction to allergens, might be activated to provide an immune response by options of antibodies which were diluted to this point that they comprise none of these biomolecules in any respect. It was as if the water molecules one way or 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 had been no longer present. This, it appeared, validated the claims made for extremely diluted homeopathic medicines. After a prolonged review course of, in which the referees insisted on seeing evidence that the impact could possibly be duplicated in three different impartial laboratories, Nature revealed the paper.



Naturally, the paper brought on a sensation. Newsweek. But no one, together with Benveniste, gave a lot consideration to the essential question of how such a 'Memory Wave' effect could be produced. The concept water molecules, linked by hydrogen bonds that final for only a few picosecond (10-12 seconds) before breaking and reforming, might one way or the other cluster into lengthy-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd. Other groups had been subsequently unable to repeat the effect, and the impartial results that the reviewers had requested for were never published. Additional experiments carried out by Benveniste's workforce, in double-blind situations overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, did not verify the unique outcomes. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-primarily based firm he set up in the wake of the controversy, he devised one other explanation for his strange outcomes. Biomolecules, he said, communicate with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic indicators, which the receptors decide up like radios tuned to a specific 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 effect, including triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, of course, infinite. Why, if this is the way in which 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 how does the memory of water fit into all of this? Benveniste proposes that transmission of the signal one way or the other entails the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper3 that now seems to be invoked each time water's 'weirdness' is at situation - for instance, to elucidate chilly fusion. The small print were not, Benveniste stated, his responsibility. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. However his failure to simplify his experimental system in order that he could clarify the exact nature of the results he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell wanting rigorous science.