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Book Review - The Memory of Water: Homeopathy and the Battle of Ideas in the New Science

Reviewed by Timothy Fior, M.D., D.Ht.

(Published in the American Journal of Homeopathic Medicine, Vol. 95, No. 1, Spring 2002)

This book by Michel Schiff, a physicist with an interest in the study of subjectivity and human prejudice in science and scientific research, is a must read for those who must attempt to explain to others how ultra dilute homeopathic remedies could possibly work. Not only does he explain the research that led Jacques Benveniste, an eminent French immunologist, to formulate the theory of the "memory of water", but he also explains how and why other orthodox scientists turned a deaf ear to what he was saying. This book is also an important treatise for those who would do homeopathic research, as it demonstrates that although scientists seem quite reasonable and logical, they can very quickly go into a state of denial when confronted with evidence which challenges their scientific world view. When this happens, seemingly no amount of data will convince them of the reality of a finding that they find a priori to be inexplicable.

Jacques Benveniste agreed to write the forward to the English version of the book, after refusing at first. He found in the book "a clear diagnosis of the reluctance of the scientific community to change paradigms and an account of how the so highly celebrated peer-review system went berserk when confronted with results that referees could not read, using the 'software' they have in hand, that is, the currently prevailing paradigm." He notes two concerns not mentioned fully in the book. First, the opinion that "unusual results requiring 'different editorial standards'" leads to "the impressive slowing down of science." His second concern not mentioned in the book "is that it is now apparent to most scientists that the current process of reductionism... is wrong... That is why, after decades of effort, we understand practically no better the response and the control of the immune system . . . than we had 30 years ago." He feels that the underlying principle which the memory of water reveals, "that molecules communicate via specific electromagnetic waves, might give us a tool to tackle biological systems no longer from the point of view of the structure, . . . but by using modern electronic and computerized means."

This book discusses in detail the four years of work performed by Benveniste and his team of scientists that suggests that water can remember prior contact with biologically active substances. The results of this research were published in Nature in 1988. The resultant brouhaha lead to a fraud squad being dispatched to Benveniste's lab essentially to disprove his work as a result of 2 negative experiments, when there were literally hundreds of positive experiments. Dr. Schiff describes in the book his 3 years of investigation into the memory of water, and his participation in some transmission experiments, "in which chemical information seems to be transmitted through an electronic device without the concomitant transport of matter." He concludes "the adamant refusal of scientists to enter into a serious discussion (of the memory of water) is an indication that there is something rotten in the kingdom of Academia."

The book is divided into two parts. The first describes the anomalous substance called water, and describes Benveniste's experiments with high dilutions and the memory of water and his transmission experiments. The second part depicts scientists' response to this unwanted new data, and explores censorship in science and the psychological aspects of scientific suppression. At the end there are 12 appendices that contain some of the raw data and information of a more technical nature. It is here that I would say that the book is missing something. For in discussing the raw data for the layman to understand, he makes it very difficult to find any overall statistical analysis of the experiments which might further convince some of the significance of these results.

In the first chapter in part one he discusses the dilemma of homeopathic dilutions diluted beyond Avogadro's number. "The hypothesis known as the memory of water does not imply negating the existence of atoms and molecules, but rather the capacity of water molecules somehow to organize in a stable manner and through such an organization to acquire the capacity of storing information obtained from other molecules. This stored information could then be played back, like a symphony that has been recorded on a magnetic tape." Here he invokes the "theory of coherent domains" by Del Giudice and Preparata to suggest a model for how water might store molecular information. These physicists came up with this theory to explain some of the anomalous properties of water such as its high melting and boiling points and the low density of ice that floats on top of water. Essentially, they suggest that water may form coherent packets that can store and then transmit electromagnetic information. At the end of the chapter he suggests that because the memory of water bridges the fields of chemistry, physics and biology, may explain why scientists don't want to hear about it.

In chapter two, he describes the basophil staining experiments performed by Davenas and Benveniste in a more detailed but less technical way than the 1988 Nature article. He notes that the basophil-staining test used in the study had been developed by Benveniste's team 10 years earlier. Since basophils express IgE on their surfaces, anti IgE or aIgE binds to their surfaces and acts like an eraser as it prevents staining. It is an ultra sensitive test but highly variable. Since the aIgE molecules are large they can easily be filtered out so that one may easily distinguish between the effects of these molecules and the memory of these molecules in high dilutions. Although the aIgE solutions were found to have a peak effect at the 3X dilution and a minimal effect on staining at the 9X dilution, as they continued to dilute, they discoverer a "second curve" where the potency of the aIgE solution started to go up again despite the fact that the concentration of the aIgE is still going down. They then performed some 250 experiments with aIgE from 1986-1990, which showed 4 manifestations of the memory of water. 1) The average number of stained basophils is lower when in contact with the high dilutions of aIgE compared to the control dilutions. 2) & 3) The number of stained basophils is more variable when contacted with the high dilutions of aIgE and oscillates as a periodic wave as compared to the control dilutions. 4) Heat of about 70 C seems to make these high dilutions ineffective, even though the original molecules are not sensitive to that temperature. They performed a variety of other high dilution experiments using basophils, which together provide amazing evidence for the memory of water (chance of results occurring by chance alone varied from 1/1000 to 1/900,000.). However, the variety of the experiments stopped after the harsh criticism received after the Nature publication, which shows the chilling effects of scientific censorship. After that point, they focused on repeating the direct experiments with aIgE and inhibitors and the transmission experiments.

The transmission experiments described in chapter three came about because a homeopath presented Benveniste with an electrical device which "transmitted chemical information", being basically a low frequency, high gain amplifier. Using this machine, Benveniste placed one vial with active ingredient on one coil of the machine, and a sealed vial of water on the other coil. When he turned the machine on, he found that the second vial was biologically potent compared to control vials. The system used here was the Langendorff apparatus, which is essentially a guinea pig or rat heart that has been presensitized to the substance being tested, and when brought in contact with that substance, the coronary blood flow is altered. These experiments showed that "some active agent had traveled from one sealed phial to the other, through both the glass walls of the tubes and the apparatus." When Benveniste found that exposure to a magnetic field negated the effect, he became convinced that the memory of water had to do with electromagnetic fields. Benveniste particularly concentrated on these transmission experiments because they negated the possibility of contamination, and thus he felt that they would convince the scientific establishment of the memory of water once and for all. He was sorely mistaken. Dr. Schiff describes in the appendix ten transmission experiments that he himself performed with positive results and odds of 1/1000 of occurring by chance alone. Although it is nice to have Dr. Schiff discuss his involvement in the experiments as confirmation, it does detract somewhat from the volume of experiments done by the Benveniste team. The theoretical problem of how some information from the active molecules might be transmitted and detected in the midst of enormous electromagnetic noise is mentioned, with reference to "stochastic resonance" as a possible explanation. At least a brief footnote of what this is would have been useful.

Part 2 reports the scientific response to Benveniste's experiments which ranged from silence to ridicule. He points out that such responses are actually a barrier to innovative research. In chapter 4 he relates the story of Semmelweis who discovered that simple hand washing before delivery prevented puerperal fever in the hospital, but who was ignored and finally went mad and died of sepsis from a wound. He then goes on to show how Benveniste received a similar response from the scientific establishment with his dramatic results. They basically couldn't understand how it was true so they concluded it was impossible and ignored the results.

In the next few chapters he delineates the types of direct and indirect censorship to which Benveniste was exposed. Dr. Schiff suggests that censorship is rarely discussed in scientific circles because this topic challenges the rigid frontier between inside and outside Academia. First, Benveniste experience editorial censorship as Nature refused to publish his new confirmatory results, and he was forced to publish them in a less well-known journal. He got even more of an editorial cold shoulder when he attempted to publish the results of the transmission experiments. He experienced institutional censorship when young scientists were dissuaded from working with him, under threat of losing their jobs at INSERM, the French national institute of medicine. Being a tenured researcher at INSERM, Benveniste had his funding gradually revoked and then lost his lab altogether. Dr. Schiff suggests that Benveniste's lack of diplomacy at times contributed to his demise, but certainly there were other larger issues involved as well. Benveniste touched a raw nerve with the scientific establishment when he communicated with the public and the media. In fact media pressure contributed to the original publication in Nature even being allowed. Although this then resulted in another form of indirect censorship, when the editor Maddox and a magician and physicist made a mock attempt to duplicate the experiments. This "fraud squad" spent 5 days in Benveniste's lab. At first they watched Davenas perform three experiments which all turned out positive. Then the "fraud squad" coded the tubes in a fourth experiment that was also positive. Then Maddox directly intervened in the scientific protocol and his team handled the pipettes, and did the coding of tubes. They did three experiments, one of which was disqualified and two were negative. Based on these two negative experiments, the "fraud squad" published their report"High dilution experiment a delusion" in Nature, ignoring the 300 experiments (50 blinded) that were overwhelmingly positive which had been performed before they arrived at the lab. Dr. Schiff notes that other systems used by at least 17 other groups have produced positive results with high dilution experiments so far. Nature invited other scientists to critique Benveniste's experiments, and these critiques appeared surprisingly quickly in Nature. These critiques constituted a form of scientific harassment, as they were in fact already contradicted by the results that Benveniste had published. Finally, Maddox and other scientists rejected Benveniste's results a priori because they were so implausible. However, Schiff points out that when an established scientists makes a claim that is uniformly rejected by his peers, in a significant percentage of times the scientist later ends up being vindicated.

Finally, Schiff mentions the scientific rumors that were spread about Benveniste as a result of this episode that truly displays the baser side of human nature. Then he shows how denigrating words are used to refer to the memory of water experiments in other scientific publications. In Chapter 9, he looks at the psychological aspects of scientific repression. He asserts that scientists respond this way when results threaten their scientific worldview, in this way behaving like a sect. He gives several examples of self-censorship, where scientists chose not to publish corroborating high dilution results so that they would not have to endure the ridicule. He discusses the illusion of objectivity which scientists have which "ignores the crucial role of human subjectivity in scientific knowledge." He concludes this intriguing chapter with a question. "The most urgent question is not . . . 'Does water really have a memory?' Rather it is... 'Do we accept that a closed group should impose their own opinions about truth on everyone, by whatever means fair or foul?'... When the stakes concern a major public health issue, (e.g. cancer), the arrogant attitude of scientists should be a matter of concern to everyone." To this I can only say touché! In the field of homeopathy in the US we are only too familiar with how the dominant allopathic, "scientific" system of medicine imposes their truth on the population in very insidious ways. In his conclusion he aptly states, "The long history of scientific dogmatism shows that today's heresy could well become tomorrow's scientific truth." Although at times the book bogs down with details (especially in the appendices), overall it is a delight to read, although the references to censorship can get a bit too poignant at times. It is a good book for homeopaths to read who have to explain the results of these experiments to others. However, I doubt that the scientific arguments made in this book would be sufficient to convince any but the softest of critics about the validity of these results.

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