The Memory Of Water : Nature Information > 자유게시판

Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'Memory Wave System of water', died in Paris on 3 October. He will definitely be remembered for the phrase his work impressed, which has turn out to be the title of a play and a rock track, in addition to a figure of everyday speech. But his controversial profession also highlighted the tricky challenge of the way to deal with research on the fringes of science, Memory Wave a question with which Nature itself turned intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a celebrity, and it's not arduous to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew how you can wield a rhetorical foil. His discuss of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-model prosecutions' played well with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, fashionable-day Inquisition. He conjured up photos of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes have been scandalized by a floor-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he recommended, a Newton difficult a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.

Again in 1988, however, Benveniste was very much a 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 notorious paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells known as basophils, which management the body's reaction to allergens, might be activated to supply an immune response by options of antibodies which were diluted up to now that they include none of these biomolecules at all. It was as though the water molecules one way or the other retained a memory of the antibodies that that they had beforehand been involved with, in order that a biological effect remained when the antibodies were now not present. This, it seemed, validated the claims made for extremely diluted homeopathic medicines. After a lengthy overview process, during which the referees insisted on seeing evidence that the impact might be duplicated in three other independent laboratories, Nature printed the paper.

Naturally, the paper brought on a sensation. Newsweek. But no one, including Benveniste, gave a lot attention to the important query of how such a 'memory' effect might be produced. The concept water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for less than about a picosecond (10-12 seconds) earlier than breaking and reforming, may in some way cluster into long-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd. Different groups were subsequently unable to repeat the impact, and the independent outcomes that the reviewers had requested for were by no means revealed. Additional experiments carried out by Benveniste's staff, in double-blind conditions overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, didn't verify the unique results. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-primarily based company he arrange in the wake of the controversy, he devised another clarification for his strange results. Biomolecules, he stated, communicate with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic alerts, which the receptors choose up like radios tuned to a particular wavelength.

Benveniste claimed that he was able to report these alerts digitally, and that by playing them back to cells within the absence of the molecules themselves he could reproduce their biochemical impact, including triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, in fact, limitless. Why, if that is the way biomolecules work, do they hassle with shape complementarity in any respect? How may 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 by some means entails the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper3 that now seems to be invoked each time water's 'weirdness' is at concern - for instance, to explain cold fusion. The details were not, Benveniste said, his responsibility. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. But his failure to simplify his experimental system in order that he could clarify the precise nature of the consequences he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell wanting rigorous science.