Chase away the supernatural, and it comes back at a gallop!
May 7, 2007
One might say to oneself: "why such a title, on a page that is meant to be a tribute to my departed friend, Jacques Benveniste?".
It's a story that we had begun to tell, with one of his students, Francis Beauvais, author of two books, which are "free to read on his site:
We had planned to construct this as a dialogue. But that required too much work and there were other emergencies. So I will summarize in broad strokes, now that Jacques is dead.
He was anything but a believer. Jacques, from a Jewish family, believed in neither God nor the Devil. He retained a naive faith in Science. The latter played on him the craziest trick possible. I won't go back over this story in detail. Jacques had one day been confronted with the problems of High Dilutions. It had begun with bee venom. By injecting it into human blood one provoked an immunological-type reaction. Jacques was above all an immunologist. I don't know much about it, except that this reaction translates into a behavior of white blood cells called basophils. These "degranulate," release substances contained in mini-capsules, and one then speaks of "basophil degranulation." The phenomenon is demonstrated by staining these things and one can count "the number of basophils that have degranulated" with the aid of a microscope.
So there is my Jacques who one fine day follows what had been suggested to him. He dilutes, dilutes, until there's nothing left. The effect diminishes, diminishes. And then, without warning, it rises again, whereas according to this dilution there shouldn't be the slightest molecule of venom left in that damned test tube.
- Dilute... dilute, there's always something left.....
Ben sends this work to the journal Nature. The referee accepts it. It is within the norms. The expert considers that the authors are honorably known. But before the article appears, John Maddox, the editor-in-chief of this prestigious journal, has a fit of temper.
- Not on my watch!
He summons Ben to withdraw his article, telling him that in case of refusal he guarantees him the worst troubles.
Jacques refuses. The article appears and it's a scandal. Nature sends to Inserm 200, to Benveniste's place, a commando made up of biologists, plus a physicist accompanied by Randi, a magician charged with detecting frauds. It's insulting. But the team plays along, yet the results prove disappointing. The bottles of champagne stay sadly in the fridge.
Maddox exults, claims that in the published paper the count of the famous granules, carried out by a lab technician, is tainted with error. Benveniste will then launch into a battle that, over the years, will get the better of his health. He seeks an experiment that is free of this possible human flaw and finds a way to accelerate the beating of a rat's heart with I don't know what anymore, but always equally diluted. Charpak, an academician, Nobel Prize in physics, is invited to the lab and witnesses a successful experiment. One injects what, according to the dilutions performed, should no longer be anything but pure water. And there is the heart racing before the academician's eyes.
Charpak withdraws, impressed.
He asks that the experiment be reproduced elsewhere and this time it's a failure. Jacques doesn't understand. The years pass, he battles, seeks a foolproof protocol. Some of his ideas are quite logical. Proteins often, not to say always, go with a very large retinue of water molecules, which surround them like a cocoon. How, under these conditions, could the Pasteur Institute's "key-lock" model work? How could these proteins interact since they travel surrounded by this mattress that masks their shapes.
Simple, says Ben: they communicate by means of electromagnetic waves.
The word is out. In biology, electromagnetism is witchcraft.
- Dangerous Dilutions....
*- Where does the energy come from, says a chemist?
- Proteins serve as antennae, as resonators. They exploit the ambient electromagnetic energy, explains Jacques. Besides, when I enclose these molecules sheltered behind a protective screen, a Faraday cage, they no longer communicate!*
Benveniste then launches into experiments where he passes a biological substance through, of which he claims to be able to record the "signature," an electromagnetic wave, and what emerges goes off to "activate pure water," located in its path. Even stronger: he claims to store on diskette the digital signal, its signature, in a way the "barcode" of the biomolecule.
Meanwhile Inserm has deprived him of his superb premises, on the first floor of the Inserm in Clamart. Stubborn, he installs Algeco prefabs in the courtyard of the lab and resumes his experiments. All this will last for years, an exhausting struggle, damaging, for a man with a heart patched up many times. But Benveniste is persuaded that Nature will deliver its verdict. Everything is a question of protocol, he thinks, confidently. Methodically he tries to eliminate all human intervention. He then works on coagulation experiments. The dilutions are carried out by a robot, as are all the manipulations.
Sometimes the results get muddled, but Jacques has confidence:
- We may not master all the parameters, but we will surely end up arriving at something totally reproducible. And then! ....
And then the matter will be judged, settled. He will have fought enough for that, exhausting his last strength. He traveled the planet in search of funds, gave lectures. How many times did I say to him:
- Jacques, you're going to leave your skin in this!
But he could no longer turn back. He had created "DIGIBIO," the first "digital biology laboratory." He had found sponsors, investors, taken out patents. It was a full-scale race forward, without the slightest possibility of turning back. Jacques fought, fought, thought only of improving his methodology in an irrefutable manner. He ended up interesting... the American army in his research. Why the army? That's a mystery. Be that as it may, he and his collaborators went across the Atlantic, multiplied successful demonstrations.
The Americans were impressed, bought a robot identical to the French machine and carried out, under Jacques's direction, these astonishing experiments.
Then came the epilogue, the curtain falling. When Benveniste had returned to France the Americans wired:
*- We're canceling the contract. It doesn't work anymore....
- But come on! You saw. When we were over there, it worked magnificently!
- Yes, yes, absolutely. We're not saying otherwise. But we analyzed all the experiments and discovered what the key parameter was that made it work.
- And it is? .....
- When your colleague Whatshisname was present next to the machine it worked every time. But since he left with you, it's over... It's as simple as that. He's the one who makes the thing work, remotely.*
Jacques already knew it, but desperately refused to believe it. He would say to me:
- It's strange. When that guy is there, simply sitting a few meters from the machine, it works better. I'd even say it works every time. It's impossible to understand..
All that smelled of the paranormal from miles away. I can testify: it was anything but Benveniste's cup of tea. The American army was his last card. The Americans are pragmatic:
- When Benveniste's buddy is present, it works, all the time. When he's not there it doesn't work anymore. That's how it is. But the fact remains that it's ultimately a failure, so we're canceling the contract ....
There is the truth, as I knew it and as his close collaborators also know it. A totally rationalist scientist, totally honest, seeking the guiding thread of pure reason, had simply fought, without knowing it, against the worst possible breed, mind-matter interaction.
Those who believe that Nature obeys the reproducible, is rational, are fooling themselves completely. That is the case most of the time but sometimes she reserves nasty jokes for you, which put the scientist completely off balance. The non-reproducible, the uncontrollable, leave us completely disarmed. I prefer math. That, that's reproducible, at least in principle.
three times seven makes twenty-one, every day of the week....
Well, I say that, but there are mathematicians who have strange lives. Not long ago one was filming the interview of one of them who told us how he talked to trees, from which he drew his science. How, when young, he had been in a sect devoted to black magic and how their leader had sold his soul to the devil for a theorem. An important thing, all the same. The sum of the cubes of the integers is an irrational number, or something close to that.
The young man who had filmed that sequence, under the gilded paneling, erased it by mistake, because of the champagne. But perhaps it's better that way. That said, a dozen people were able to see with their eyes, hear with their ears what I had known for a long time. There are things one doesn't know how to classify. That's how it is.
Let's return to Jacques. He was exhausted. He had fought too much. Life was withdrawing from him. His patched-up heart was falling to pieces. He died on an operating table. Fighting, I know what that is, oh yes! And I wonder why, among the three of us: him, Bounias and me, I survived. No doubt because I knew many times how to unhook to find shelter elsewhere, in another field. In comic strips for example. That's why I've done so many things. I know what it is to endure crossfire, implacable. I think back to Rémy Chauvin's phrase:
- In our university-research world, one must not exaggerate anything. It never goes further than assassination!
Below is a drawing that Jacques had framed, in his office:
Ben and Bounias died "on the research front." But the craziest epilogue is the one Jacques experienced.
I will finish by citing an anecdote, which is found in the book of the guy whose name I've forgotten. He will remind me to remember him kindly. One day a fellow arrives at Benveniste's lab with a "machine" of his invention. It was ... a simple little box, empty. No power supply, no antenna, nothing. The details are in the book, if one can call those details. The guy gives them a demonstration of his "device" which works miracles, provokes any number of phenomena, on demand. Benveniste and his collaborators remain dumbfounded. When the man leaves with his empty box, a close collaborator of Benveniste says to him:
*- Well, what do we do now?
- We start by keeping our mouths shut.*
.
Time has passed. Jacques died stupidly, overtaken by a vicious chimera, he who was honesty itself. At one time I had made drawings. I found them again and I deliver them to you, pell-mell. A sort of digital flea market..
