The memory of water
The life and work of Jacques Benveniste
taught us valuable lessons about how to deal with fringe science, says Philip
Ball.
Philip Ball
Benveniste’s paper seemed to validate the claims made for
homeopathic medicines.© Getty
Jacques
Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', died in Paris on 3
October. He will certainly be remembered for the phrase his work inspired,
which has become the title of a play and a rock song, as well as a figure of
everyday speech.
But
his controversial career also highlighted the tricky issue of how to deal with
research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself became
intimately entangled.
In
France, Benveniste was a celebrity, and it is not hard to see why. He was a
charismatic showman who knew how to wield a rhetorical foil. His talk of
witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-style prosecutions'
played well with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day
Inquisition.
He
conjured up images of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized
by a ground-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He
was, he suggested, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic
cartesianism.
Back
in 1988, however, Benveniste was very much part of the establishment. He was
the senior director of the French medical research organization INSERM's Unit
200, in Clamart, which studied the immunology of allergy and inflammation.
“A talk he
delivered last June was a blinding blizzard of histograms.”
That
was when he sent his notorious paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood
cells called basophils, which control the body's reaction to allergens, can be
activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies that have
been diluted so far that they contain none of these biomolecules at all.
Incredible result
It
was as though the water molecules somehow retained a memory of the antibodies
that they had previously been in contact with, so that a biological effect
remained when the antibodies were no longer present. This, it seemed, validated
the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines.
After
a lengthy review process, in which the referees insisted on seeing evidence
that the effect could be duplicated in three other independent laboratories, Nature
published the paper. The editor, John Maddox, prefaced it with an editorial
comment entitled 'When to believe the unbelievable', which admitted:
"There is no objective explanation of these observations."
Naturally,
the paper caused a sensation. "Homeopathy finds scientific support,"
claimed Newsweek. But no one, including Benveniste, gave much attention to the
critical question of how such a 'memory' effect could be produced.
The
paper itself offered only the suggestion, at face value almost meaningless,
that "Water could act as a 'template' for the [antibody] molecule, for
example by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic
fields."
The
idea that water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for only about
a picosecond (10-12 seconds) before breaking and reforming, could
somehow cluster into long-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd.
Other
teams were subsequently unable to repeat the effect, and the independent
results that the reviewers had asked for were never published. Further
experiments carried out by Benveniste's team, in double-blind conditions
overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud
investigator Walter Stewart, failed to verify the original results.
The
Nature paper was never retracted, but Maddox subsequently commented, "My
own conviction is that it remains to be shown there is a phenomenon to be
explained" (see “"Waves caused by extreme dilution":http://www.nature.com/cgi-bin/doifinder.pl?URL=/doifinder/10.1038/335760a0”).
Digital biology
Benveniste
was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims.
At DigiBio, the Paris-based company he set up in the wake of the controversy,
he devised another explanation for his strange results. Biomolecules, he said,
communicate with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency
electromagnetic signals, which the receptors pick up like radios tuned to a
specific wavelength.
Benveniste
claimed that he was able to record these signals digitally, and that by playing
them back to cells in the absence of the molecules themselves he could
reproduce their biochemical effect, including triggering a defence response in
neutrophils, which kill invading cells2.
The
questions this raises are, of course, endless. Why, if this is the way
biomolecules work, do they bother with shape complementarity at all? (When I
asked Benveniste this, he said something about audio earpieces being shaped to
fit the ear.)
How
could a molecule act as an antenna for electromagnetic wavelengths of several
kilometres? And how does the memory of water fit into all of this? Benveniste
proposes that transmission of the signal somehow involves the 'quantum-coherent
domains' proposed in a paper3 that now seems to be invoked whenever
water's 'weirdness' is at issue - for example, to explain cold fusion.
Blinded by science
The
details were not, Benveniste said, his responsibility. He was an immunologist,
not a physicist.
But
his failure to simplify his experimental system so that he could clarify the
precise nature of the effects he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them,
fell short of rigorous science. Benveniste could surely have tested his
radio-transmission theory at the level of simple, cell-free molecular systems.
I
have found no evidence that he ever devised such experiments: he stayed at the
level of cells, tissues or whole organisms, where direct cause-and-effect is
hard to track and statistical tests are needed to cope with the significant
responses from control samples. The talk that I saw he and his co-workers
deliver last June was a blinding blizzard of histograms.
There
can be no doubt that Benveniste was genuinely convinced he had chanced upon
something revolutionary. It is a shame that he became isolated (he may have played
a part in that), which meant that genuine enquiry into his curious findings was
hampered by posturing on all sides.
But
the fact that it is the 'memory of water', not 'digital biology', that he will
be remembered for illustrates a point that I think Jacques failed to
appreciate: his work tapped into a potent and persistent cultural myth about
the miraculous properties of water. And under the influence of myth, it can be
hard to keep a level head.
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