The Field (12 page)

As Popp was pondering the larger implications of biophoton emissions, a French scientist had been examining the reverse: the effect of this light on individual molecules. Popp believed that biophoton emissions orchestrated all bodily processes, and the French scientist was finding out the exquisite way in which it worked. The biophoton vibrations Popp had observed in the body caused molecules to vibrate and create their own signature frequency, which acted as its unique driving force and also its means of communication. The French scientist had paused to listen to these tiny oscillations and heard the symphony of the universe. Every molecule of our bodies was playing a note that was being heard round the world.

This discovery represented a permanent and arduous detour in the career of French scientist Jacques Benveniste, which had, up until the 1980s, followed a distinguished, predictable arc. Benveniste, a doctor of medicine, had put in his residency in the Paris hospital system, and then moved into research into allergies, becoming a specialist in the mechanisms of allergy and inflammation. He’d been appointed research director at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and distinguished himself by discovering PAF, or platelet activating factor, which is involved in the mechanism of allergies such as asthma.

At 50, Benveniste had the world at his feet. There was no doubt that he would look forward to international acclaim among the establishment. He was proud of being French in a field not necessarily well represented by his countrymen since Descartes. Rumours abounded about the possibility that Benveniste would be one of the few French biologists to be considered as a possible recipient for the Nobel prize. His papers were among those most often cited by scientists at INSERM, a measure of distinction and standing. He’d even received the Silver Medal from CNRS, one of the most prestigious French scientific honors. Benveniste possessed craggy good looks, a regal bearing, and a rakish sense of humor, and he’d been married for 30 years. Nevertheless, neither his marital status nor his present contentment in the slightest curbed a tendency to innocently flirt, an attribute that, as a Frenchman, he considered more or less mandatory.

And then, in 1984, this bright and assured future was accidentally derailed by what turned out to be a small error in computation. Benveniste’s laboratory at INSERM had been studying basophil degranulation – the reaction of certain white blood cells to allergens. One day, Elisabeth Davenas, one of his best laboratory technicians, came to him and reported that she’d seen and recorded a reaction in the white blood cells, even though there had been too few molecules of the allergen in the solution. This had all come about as the result of a simple error in calculation. She had thought the starting solution was more concentrated than it was. In diluting it to what she thought was the usual concentration, she had inadvertently diluted the solution to the point where very few of the original antigen molecules remained.

After examining the data, Jacques virtually shooed her out of his office. The results you are claiming are impossible, he declared, because there are no molecules here.

‘You have been experimenting with water,’ he told her. ‘Go back and do the work over.’

It was only when she tried to repeat the experiment with the same dilution and came up with the same results that he realized that Elisabeth, a meticulous worker, might have stumbled onto something worth investigating. For several weeks, Elisabeth kept returning to his office with the same inexplicable data, showing powerful biological effects from a solution so weakened that it couldn’t have enough of the antigen to have caused them, and Jacques attempted to come up with ever more far-fetched explanations to fit these results to some recognizable biological theory. Perhaps it was the presence of a second antibody reacting later, or maybe the reaction to an undisclosed second antigen, he thought. After observing these results, one of the tutors in his laboratory, a doctor who was also a homeopath, happened to remark that these experiments were quite similar to the principle of homeopathy. In that system of medicine, solutions of active substance are diluted to the point where there is virtually none of the original substance left, only its ‘memory’. At the time, Jacques didn’t even know what homeopathy was – that’s how classical a doctor he was – but the research scientist in him had had his appetite sufficiently whetted. He asked Elisabeth to dilute the solutions even more, so that absolutely none of the original active substance remained. In these new studies, no matter how dilute the solution, which was, by now, just plain water, Elisabeth kept getting consistent results, as if the active ingredient were still there.

Because of his background as an allergy specialist, Jacques had used a standard allergy test for his studies, the purpose of which was to effect a typical allergic response in human cells. He isolated basophils, a type of white blood cell which contains antibodies of immunoglobulin E (IgE) type on its surface. It is these cells which are responsible for hypersensitivity reactions in people with allergies.

Jacques chose IgE cells because they easily respond to allergens such as pollen or dust mites, releasing histamine from their intracellular granules, and also to certain anti-IgE antibodies. If this kind of a cell is affected by something, you’re not likely to miss it. Another advantage of the IgE is that he could test their staining properties through a test he’d developed and patented at INSERM. Because basophils, like most cells, have a jelly-like appearance, when you’re studying them at a lab, you need to stain them in order to see them. But staining, even with a standard dye such as toluidine blue, is subject to change, depending upon many factors – the health of the host, say, and the influence of other cells upon the original. When these IgE cells are exposed to anti-IgE antibodies, it changes their ability to absorb the dye. Anti-IgE has been referred to as a kind of ‘biological paint-stripper’
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because its ability to inhibit the dye is so effective that it can virtually render the basophils invisible again.

The final logic in Benveniste’s choice of anti-IgE had to do with the fact that these particular molecules are especially big. If you are attempting to see if water retained its effect even when all anti-IgE molecules had been filtered out of it, there would be no chance that any of them might be accidentally left behind.

In the studies, conducted over four years between 1985 and 1989, and painstakingly recorded in the laboratory books of Elisabeth Davenas, Benveniste’s team created high dilutions of the anti-IgE by pouring one-tenth of the previous solution into the next tube and filling it up by adding nine parts of a standard solvent. Each dilution was then vigorously shaken (or succussed, as it is technically known), as it is in homeopathic preparations. In total, the team used dilutions like these, of one part solution to nine parts solvent, then kept diluting until there was one part of solution to ninety-nine parts solvent and even one part solution to nine hundred and ninety-nine parts solvent.

Each one of the high dilutions was successively added to the basophils, which were then counted under the microscope. To Jacques’ surprise, as much as anyone’s, they discovered that they were recording effects in inhibiting dye absorption by up to 66 per cent, even with dilutions watered down to one part in 10
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. In later experiments, when the dilutions were serially diluted a hundred-fold, eventually to one part in 10
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, where there was virtually no possibility that a single molecule of the IgE was left, the basophils were still affected.

The most unexpected phenomenon was yet to come. Although the potency of the anti-IgE was at its highest at concentrations of one part in 1000 (the third decimal dilution) and then started to decrease with each successive dilution, as you might logically expect, the experiment took a U-turn at the ninth dilution. The effect of the highly dilute IgE began increasing at this point and continued to increase, the more it was diluted.
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As homeopathy had always claimed, the weaker the solution, the more powerful its effect.

Benveniste joined forces with five different laboratories in four countries, France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of whom were able to replicate his results. The thirteen scientists then jointly published the results of their four-year collaboration in a 1988 edition of the highly prestigious
Nature
magazine, showing that if solutions of antibodies were diluted repeatedly until they no longer contained a single molecule of the antibody, they still produced a response from immune cells.
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The authors concluded that none of the molecules they’d started with were present in certain dilutions and that:

specific information must have been transmitted during the dilution/shaking process. Water could act as a template for the molecule, for example, by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields … The precise nature of this phenomenon remains unexplained.

To the popular press, which pounced on the published paper, Benveniste had discovered ‘the memory of water’, and his studies were widely regarded as making a valid case for homeopathy. Benveniste himself realized that his results had repercussions far beyond any theory of alternative medicine. If water were able to imprint and store information from molecules, this would have an impact on our understanding of molecules and how they ‘talk’ to one another in our bodies, as molecules in human cells, of course, are surrounded by water. In any living cell, there are ten thousand molecules of water for each molecule of protein.

Nature
also undoubtedly understood the possible repercussions of this finding on the accepted laws of biochemistry. The editor, John Maddox, had consented to publish the article, but he did so after taking an unprecedented step – placing an editorial addendum at the bottom of the article:

Editorial reservation

Readers of this article may share the incredulity of the many referees who have commented on several versions of it during the past several months. The essence of the result is that an aqueous solution of an antibody retains its ability to evoke a biological response even when diluted to such an extent that there is a negligible chance of their being a single molecule in any sample. There is no physical basis for such an activity. With the kind collaboration of Professor Benveniste,
Nature
has therefore arranged for independent investigators to observe repetitions of the experiments. A report of this investigation will appear shortly.

In his own editorial, Maddox also invited readers to pick holes in the Benveniste study.
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Benveniste was a proud man, not afraid to wave a fist in the face of the Establishment. He was not only willing to stick his head above the parapet in choosing to publish in one of the most conservative journals in the whole of the scientific community, but then, when they doubted him, he eagerly snatched up the gauntlet they’d thrown down by agreeing to their request to reproduce his results at his laboratory.

Four days after publication, Maddox himself arrived with what Benveniste described as a scientific ‘fraud squad’, composed of Walter Stewart, a well-known quackbuster, and James Randi, a professional magician who tended to be called in to expose scientific work that had actually been arrived at by sleight of hand. Were a magician, a journalist and a quackbuster the best possible team to assess the subtle changes in biological experimentation, wondered Benveniste. Under their watchful eye, Elisabeth Davenas performed four experiments, one blinded, all of which, Benveniste said, were successful. Nevertheless, Maddox and his team disputed the findings and decided to change the experimental protocol and tighten the coding procedures, even, in a melodramatic gesture, taping the code to the ceiling. Stewart insisted on carrying out some of the experiments himself and changed some of their design even though, Benveniste claimed, he was untrained in these particular experiments.

Under their new protocol, and amid a charged atmosphere implying that the INSERM team were hiding something, three more tests were done and shown not to work. At this point, Maddox and his team had their results and promptly left, first asking for photocopies of 1500 of Benveniste’s papers.

Soon after their five-day visit,
Nature
published a report entitled ‘High dilution experiments a delusion’. It claimed that Benveniste’s lab had not observed good scientific protocol. It discounted supporting data from other labs. Maddox expressed surprise that the studies didn’t work all the time, when this is standard in biological studies – one reason Benveniste had conducted more than 300 trials before publishing. The Maddox judgment also failed to note that the staining test is highly sensitive and can be tipped with the slightest change in experimental condition, so that some donor blood isn’t affected by even high concentrations of anti-IgE. They expressed dismay that two of Benveniste’s co-authors were being funded by a manufacturer of homeopathic medicines. Industry funding is standard in scientific research, countered Benveniste. Were they implying that the results were altered to please the sponsor?

Benveniste fought back with an impassioned response and a plea for scientific open-mindedness:

Salem witchhunts or McCarthy-like prosecutions will kill science. Science flourishes only in freedom … The only way definitively to establish conflicting results is to reproduce them. It may be that all of us are wrong in good faith. This is no crime but science as usual.
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