The Field (14 page)

Several years after the memory of water
Nature
episode, scientific teams still tried to prove Benveniste wrong. Professor Madelene Ennis of Queen’s University in Belfast joined a large pan-European research team, with hopes of showing, once and for all, that homeopathy and water memory were utter nonsense. A consortium of four independent laboratories in Italy, France, Belgium and Holland, led by Professor M. Roberfroid of the Catholic University of Louvain, in Brussels, carried out a variation of Benveniste’s original experiment with basophil degranulation. The experiment was impeccable. None of the researchers knew which was the homeopathic solution and which pure water. All the solutions had even been prepared by labs which had nothing further to do with the trial. Results were also coded and decoded and tabulated by an independent researcher also unconnected with the study.

In the end, three of four labs got statistically significant results with the homeopathic preparations. Professor Ennis still didn’t believe these results and put them down to human error. To eliminate the possible vagaries of humans, she applied an automated counting protocol to the figures she had. Nevertheless, even the automated results showed the same. The high dilutions of the active ingredient worked, whether the active ingredient was actually present or water so dilute that none of the original substance remained. Ennis was forced to concede: ‘The results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for rational explanations for our findings.’
²⁰

This represented the last straw to Benveniste. If Ennis’s results were negative, they would have been published in
Nature
, thereby forever consigning his work to the trash heap. Because their results agreed with his, they were published in a relatively obscure journal, a few years after the event, a guarantee that no one would really notice.

Besides Ennis’s results, there were all the scientific studies of homeopathy which lent support to Benveniste’s findings. Excellent, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials showed that homeopathy works for, among many conditions, asthma,
²¹
diarrhea,
²²
upper respiratory tract infections in children
²³
and even heart disease.
²⁴
Of at least 105 trials of homeopathy, 81 showed positive results.

The most unassailable were carried out in Glasgow by Dr David Reilly, whose double-blind, placebo-controlled studies showed that homeopathy works for asthma, with all the usual checks and balances of a pristine scientific study.
²⁵
Despite the scientific design of the trial, an editorial in
The Lancet
, redolent of
Nature’s
response to Benveniste’s initial findings, agreed to publish the results but simply refused to accept them:

What could be more absurd than the notion that a substance is therapeutically active in dilutions so great that the patient is unlikely to receive a single molecule of it? [said the editorial]. Yes, the dilution principle of homeopathy is absurd; so the reason for any therapeutic effect presumably lies elsewhere.
²⁶

On reading
The Lancet
’s on-going debate on the Reilly studies, Benveniste couldn’t resist responding:

This recalls, inexorably, the wonderfully self-sufficient contribution of a nineteenth-century French academician to the heated debate over the existence of meteorites, which animated the scientific community at the time: ‘Stones do not fall from the sky because there are no stones in the sky.’
²⁷

Benveniste was so tired of laboratories trying and sometimes failing to replicate his work that he had Guillonnet build him a robot. Nothing much more than a box with an arm which moves in three directions, the robot could handle everything but the initial measuring. All one had to do was to hand it the bare ingredients plus a bit of plastic tubing, push the button and leave. The robot would take the water containing calcium, place it into a coil, play the heparin signal for five minutes, so that the water is ‘informed’, then mix the informed water in its test-tube with the plasma, put the mixture in a measuring device, read the results and offer them up to whoever is doing the investigation. Benveniste and his team carried out hundreds of experiments using their robot, but the main idea was to hand out a batch of these devices to other labs. In this way, both the other centres and the Clamart team can ensure that the experiment is universally standardized and an identical protocol carried out correctly.

While working with his robot, Benveniste discovered on a large scale what Popp had witnessed in the laboratory with his water fleas – evidence that the electromagnetic waves from living things were having an effect on their environment.

Once Benveniste had got his robot up and working, he discovered that generally it worked well, except for certain occasions. Those occasions were always the days when a particular woman was present in the lab.
Cherchez la femme
, Benveniste thought, although in the Lyon lab, which was replicating their results, a similar situation occurred, this time with a man. In his own lab, Benveniste conducted several experiments, by hand and by robot, to isolate what it was the woman was doing which prevented the experiment from working. Her scientific method was impeccable and she followed the protocol to the letter. The woman herself, a doctor and biologist, was an experienced, meticulous worker. Nevertheless, on no occasion did she get any results. After six months of such studies there was only a single conclusion: something about her very presence was preventing a positive result.

It was vital that he got to the nub of the problem, for Jacques knew what was at stake. He might send his robot to a laboratory in Cambridge, and if they got poor results as a result of a particular person, the lab would conclude that the experiment itself was at fault, when the problem had to do with something or someone in the environment.

There is nothing subtle about biological effects. Change the structure or shape of a molecule only slightly and you will completely alter the ability of the molecule to slot in with its receptor cells. On or off, success or failure. A drug works or it doesn’t. In this case, something in the woman in question was completely interfering with the communication of cells in his experiment.

Benveniste suspected that the woman must be emitting some form of waves that were blocking the signals. Through his work he developed a means of testing for these, and he soon discovered that she was emitting electromagnetic fields which were interfering with the communication signalling of his experiment. Like Popp’s carcinogenic substances, she was a frequency scrambler. This seemed too incredible to believe – more the realm of witchcraft than science, Benveniste thought. He then had the particular woman hold a tube of homeopathic granules in her hand for five minutes, and then tested the tube with his equipment. All activity – all molecular signaling – had been erased.
²⁸

Benveniste wasn’t a theorist. He wasn’t even a physicist. He’d accidentally trespassed into the world of electromagnetism and now was stuck here, experimenting in what for him was completely foreign territory – the memory of water and the ability of molecules to vibrate at very high and very low frequencies. These were the two mysteries that he was getting no closer to solving. All that he could do was to carry on where he felt most comfortable – with his laboratory experiments – showing that these effects were real. But one thing did seem clear to him. For some unknown reason that he didn’t dwell upon, these signals also appeared to be sent outside the body and somehow were being taken in and listened to.

CHAPTER FIVE

Resonating with the World

V
IRTUALLY EVERY EXPERIMENT HAD
been a failure. The rats were not performing as expected. The entire point of the exercise, as far as Karl Lashley was concerned, had been to find where the engrams were – the precise location in the brain where memories were stored. The name ‘engram’ had been coined by Wilder Penfield in the 1920s after he thought he’d discovered that memories had an exact address in the brain. Penfield had performed extraordinary research on epileptic patients with anaesthetized scalps while they were fully conscious, showing that if he stimulated certain parts of their brains with electrodes, specific scenes from their past could be evoked in living color and excruciating detail. Even more amazingly, whenever he had stimulated the same spot in the brain (often unbeknownst to the patient) it seemed to elicit the same flashback, with the same level of detail.

Penfield, and an army of scientists after him, naturally concluded that certain portions of the brain were allotted to hold captive specific memories. Every last detail of our lives had been carefully encoded in specific spots in the brain, like guests at a restaurant placed at certain tables by a particularly exacting maitre d’. All we needed to find was who was sitting where – and, perhaps as a bonus, who the maitre d’ was.

For nearly 30 years Lashley, a renowned American neuropsychologist, had been looking for engrams. It was 1946, and at his laboratory at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology in Florida, he’d been searching across all sorts of species to find out what it was in the brain – or where it was – that was responsible for memory. He’d thought that he would be amplifying Penfield’s findings, when all he seemed to be doing was proving him wrong. Lashley tended to the hypercritical, and small wonder. It was as though his life’s entire oeuvre had a singularly negative purpose: to disprove all the work of his forebears. The other gospel of the time that still held the scientific community in thrall, but which Lashley was busily disproving, was the notion that every psychological process had a measurable physical manifestation – the move of a muscle, the secretion of a chemical. Once again, the brain was simply, fussily, the maitre d’. Although he’d mainly been working in primate research in his early work, he’d then moved onto rats. He’d built them a jumping stand, where they learned to jump through miniature doors to reach a reward of food. To underscore the object of the exercise, those that didn’t respond correctly fell into pond water.
¹

Once he was convinced that they’d learned the routine, Lashley systematically set about trying to surgically blot out that memory. For all his criticism of the failings of other researchers, Lashley’s own surgical technique was a mess – a makeshift and hurried operation. His was a laboratory protocol that would have incensed any modern-day animal-rights champion. Lashley didn’t employ aseptic technique, largely because it wasn’t considered necessary for rats. He was a crude and sloppy surgeon, by any medical standard, possibly deliberately so, sewing up wounds with a simple stitch – a perfect recipe for brain infection in larger mammals – but no cruder than most brain researchers of the day. After all, none of Ivan Pavlov’s dogs survived his brain surgery, all succumbing to brain abscesses or epilepsy.
²
Lashley sought to deactivate certain portions of his rats’ brains to find which part held the precious key to specific memories. To accomplish this delicate task he chose as his surgical instrument his wife’s curling iron –
a curling iron!
– and simply burned off the part he wished to remove.
³

His initial attempts to find the seat of specific memories failed; the rats, though sometimes even physically impaired, remembered exactly what they’d been taught. Lashley fried more and more sections of brain; the rats still seemed to make it through the jumping stand. Lashley became even more liberal with the curling iron, working through one part of the brain to the next, but still it didn’t seem to have any effect on the rat’s ability to remember. Even when he’d injured the vast majority of the brains of individual rats – and a curling iron caused much more damage to the brain than any clean surgical cut – their motor skills might be impaired, and they might stagger disjointedly along,
but the rats always remembered the routine
.

Although they represented a failure of sorts, the results appealed to the iconoclast in Lashley. The rats had confirmed what he had long suspected. In his 1929 monograph
Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence
, a small work that had first gained him notoriety with its radical notions, Lashley had already elucidated his view that cortical function appeared to be equally potent everywhere.
⁴
As he would later point out, the necessary conclusion from all his experimental work ‘is that learning just is not possible at all’.
⁵
When it came to cognition, for all intents and purposes, the brain was a mush.
⁶

For Karl Pribram, a young neurosurgeon who’d relocated to Florida just to do research with the great man, Lashley’s failures were something of a revelation. Pribram had bought Lashley’s monograph for ten cents second-hand, and when he first arrived in Florida, he hadn’t been shy about challenging it with the same fervor Lashley had reserved for many of his peers. Lashley had been stimulated by his bright upstart apprentice, whom he would eventually regard as the closest he ever had to a son.