Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'Memory Wave App of water', died in Paris on 3 October. He will certainly be remembered for the phrase his work impressed, which has turn into the title of a play and a rock music, in addition to a figure of on a regular basis speech. But his controversial career additionally highlighted the tough problem of how you can deal with research on the fringes of science, a query with which Nature itself turned intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a star, and it is not laborious 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' played well with these inclined to regard science as an arrogant, fashionable-day Inquisition. He conjured up pictures of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a floor-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he advised, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.
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Back in 1988, however, Benveniste was very a lot a 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 control the physique's response to allergens, could be activated to provide an immune response by options of antibodies which have been diluted thus far that they comprise none of these biomolecules in any respect. It was as if the water molecules by some means retained a memory of the antibodies that they'd beforehand been involved with, so that a biological effect remained when the antibodies have been no longer present. This, it appeared, validated the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines. After a lengthy overview process, through which the referees insisted on seeing proof that the effect might be duplicated in three different impartial laboratories, Nature published the paper.
Naturally, the paper caused a sensation. Newsweek. But no one, including Benveniste, gave much attention to the vital query of how such a 'memory' effect may very well be produced. The idea that water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that final for under about a picosecond (10-12 seconds) earlier than breaking and reforming, could one way or the other cluster into lengthy-lived mimics of the antibody appeared absurd. Other teams were subsequently unable to repeat the impact, Memory Wave App and the independent results that the reviewers had requested for were by no means revealed. 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, failed to confirm the unique results. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-based mostly company he arrange within the wake of the controversy, he devised one other rationalization for his unusual outcomes. Biomolecules, he stated, communicate with their receptor Memory Wave molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic signals, Memory Wave which the receptors choose up like radios tuned to a specific wavelength.
Benveniste claimed that he was able to report these indicators digitally, and that by taking part in them back to cells within the absence of the molecules themselves he might reproduce their biochemical effect, together with triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, after all, endless. Why, if that is the way biomolecules work, do they bother with shape complementarity in any respect? How could a molecule act as an antenna for electromagnetic wavelengths of several kilometres? And how does the memory of water match into all of this? Benveniste proposes that transmission of the sign someway involves 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 clarify chilly fusion. The small print were not, Benveniste mentioned, his accountability. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. However his failure to simplify his experimental system in order that he may clarify the precise nature of the consequences he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell short of rigorous science.