Homeopathy: The Memory of Water – Scientific Experiments with Basophils
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Translation of the article from The Guardian (London), dated 15/03/01
Thank You for the Memory
...Experiments support what has been considered a scientific heresy, says Lionel Milgrom on Thursday, March 15, 2001. Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University in Belfast, like most scientists, remains deeply skeptical about homeopathy. The idea that a pharmaceutical compound, highly diluted to the point where none remains, could still exert a therapeutic effect is an affront to conventional biochemistry and pharmacology, which are based on direct and tangible molecular events. The same applies to the possible explanation for how homeopathy might work: water somehow retaining a "memory" of substances previously dissolved in it. This latter notion, widely popularized by French biologist Dr. Jacques Benveniste, cost him his laboratory, his funding, and ultimately his international scientific credibility.
...Yet this did not discourage Professor Ennis, who, as a scientist, was not afraid to test whether Benveniste was wrong. Thus, more than a decade after Benveniste was excommunicated by the mainstream scientific community, she seized the opportunity to join a large pan-European research team in the hope of finally settling the "Benveniste affair" on scientific grounds. But she did not expect a shock: the most recent results from the team now suggest, fueling controversy, that Benveniste may have been right all along. In 1985, Benveniste began experiments with white blood cells involved in allergic reactions, known as basophils. These cells contain small granules filled with substances such as histamine, partly responsible for allergic responses. These granules can be stained with a special dye, but they lose their color (a process called "degranulation") when exposed to a substance known as anti-immunoglobulin E or aIgE. So far, this is standard science. What Benveniste claimed—and which sparked a fierce controversy—was that he continued to observe degranulation of basophils even when aIgE had been diluted to the point where none remained, provided that at each dilution step, as in the preparation of homeopathic remedies, the solution underwent intense agitation.
...After countless experiments, Benveniste wrote up his findings and published them in the journal Nature in 1988, suggesting that the water used in these experiments might have retained a kind of "memory" of the originally dissolved aIgE. Homeopaths rejoiced, convinced they had finally found solid proof to make homeopathy scientifically respectable. Yet the celebration did not last long. Under the direction of the Nature team, which notoriously included a magician (who found no flaw in Benveniste’s methodology—only in his results), Benveniste was publicly ridiculed by the scientific establishment. Scientists from London University College attempted to replicate these experiments, failed, and reported their failure in Nature in 1993. Since then, Benveniste has worked hard to convince other independent laboratories to reproduce his work, arguing that negative results like those from the English team were due to a misunderstanding of his experimental protocols.
...Then Professor Ennis and the pan-European research effort entered the scene. A consortium of four independent research laboratories in France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, led by Professor Robert Froid at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, used an improved version of Benveniste’s original experiment, focusing on another aspect of basophil activation. The team knew that activation of basophil degranulation by aIgE leads to the release of powerful mediators, including very large amounts of histamine, which triggers a negative feedback cycle that limits its own release. Thus, the pan-European team’s experiment involved comparing the inhibition of aIgE-induced basophil degranulation with "ghost" dilutions of histamine against pure water control solutions.
...This technique, comments J. Benveniste, was what we had presented in an earlier version of the article submitted to Nature in 1987, which was reviewed by the team of A. Spira (INSERM U 292) and published in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences in 1991. We had chosen instead to use direct activation of basophils, which was simpler. To ensure no artifact could be introduced by the scientists in the four participating laboratories, these researchers did not know the contents of the test solutions. In other words, they could not tell whether the solutions they added to the anti-IgE-basophil reaction contained "ghost" amounts of histamine or simply pure water.
...But that’s not all. The "ghost" histamine solutions and controls were prepared in three different laboratories entirely uninvolved in the experiments. The entire experiment was coordinated by an independent researcher who coded all solutions and collected the results but had no involvement in the testing or analysis. Thus, there is little room for fraud or self-deception in this entire affair. When the results arrived, they were a complete surprise. Three of the four laboratories involved reported statistically significant inhibition of basophil degranulation by the "ghost" histamine solutions compared to controls. The fourth laboratory produced a result that was nearly significant, so the overall result from all four laboratories was positive for the "ghost" histamine solutions.
...But Professor Ennis was still not satisfied. "In this trial, we had stained the basophils and manually counted those that remained stained after inhibition of the reaction by histamine. You might argue that a human error could have crept in at this stage of the protocol." She therefore employed a previously developed method of basophil counting that could be fully automated, involving labeling activated basophils with a monoclonal antibody, observable via a fluorescent reaction measured by a machine. The result, which will soon be published in Inflammation Research, proved identical to the previous one: both pharmacologically active concentrations and extremely high dilutions of histamine induced statistically significant inhibition...