Thank you for the memory
DIGITAL BIOLOGY LABORATORY
32 Rue des Carnets, 92140 Clamart, France
Director: Dr J. Benveniste
Tel. +33.(0)1.46.01.58.40
Fax +33.(0)1.46.31.02.77
Email: jbenveniste@digibio.com
Website: www.digibio.com
Translation of an article from The Guardian (London) dated March 15, 2001
Thank you for the memory
...Experiments support what was once considered scientific heresy, says Lionel Milgrom on Thursday, March 15, 2001. Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen’s University in Belfast, like most scientists, is deeply skeptical about homeopathy. The idea that a pharmaceutical compound, diluted to the point where none remains, could have any therapeutic effect is an affront to conventional biochemistry and pharmacology, which are based on direct, tangible molecular events. The same goes for the proposed mechanism by which homeopathy works: water somehow retains a “memory” of substances dissolved in it. This concept, popularized largely by French biologist Dr Jacques Benveniste, cost him his laboratory, funding, and ultimately his international scientific credibility.
...Yet this did not deter Professor Ennis, who, as a scientist, wasn’t afraid to try to prove Benveniste wrong. Thus, more than a decade after Benveniste was ostracized by the mainstream scientific community, she seized the opportunity to join a large pan-European research team in hopes of finally resolving the “Benveniste affair” based on scientific criteria. But she didn’t expect to be shocked: indeed, the latest results from the team now suggest, thereby fueling controversy, that Benveniste may have been right from the outset. In 1985, Benveniste began experimenting with white blood cells involved in allergic reactions, called basophils. These cells contain small granules holding substances such as histamine, partly responsible for the allergic response. These granules can be stained with a special dye but lose their color (“degranulate”) in the presence of a substance called anti-immunoglobulin E or aIgE. So far, we’re within standard science. What Benveniste claimed—and which sparked 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 stage of dilution, similar to how homeopathic remedies are prepared, the dilution underwent vigorous shaking.
...After numerous experiments, Benveniste wrote up his findings and in 1988 published them in the journal Nature, suggesting that the water used in these experiments might retain some sort of “memory” of the originally dissolved aIgE. Homeopaths rejoiced, convinced they finally had solid evidence to make homeopathy scientifically respectable. However, the celebration didn’t last long. Under the guidance of the Nature editorial team, which notably included a magician (who found no flaw in Benveniste’s methodology—only in his results), Benveniste was condemned by the scientific establishment. British scientists from University College London attempted to replicate these experiments; their efforts failed, and they reported this in Nature in 1993. Since then, they’ve tried to convince other independent laboratories to reproduce his work, claiming that negative results like theirs resulted from a misunderstanding of his experimental protocols.
...That’s where Professor Ennis and the pan-European research effort come in. A consortium of four independent research labs in France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, led by Professor Robertfroid at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels, used a refinement of Benveniste’s original experiment addressing another aspect of basophil activation. This team knew that activation of basophil degranulation by aIgE leads to release of powerful mediators including large amounts of histamine, which triggers a negative feedback loop limiting its own release. Thus, the pan-European experiment involved comparing inhibition of basophil degranulation induced by aIgE with “phantom” dilutions of histamine versus control solutions of pure water.
...It’s this technique, comments J. Benveniste, that we presented in an early version of our paper submitted to Nature in 1987, which was reviewed by A. Spira’s team (INSERM U 292) and published in Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences in 1991. We preferred the simpler method of direct basophil activation. To ensure no artifacts could be introduced by scientists from the four labs involved, they were unaware of the contents of the test solutions. In other words, they couldn’t know whether the solutions added to the anti-IgE-basophil reaction contained “phantom” amounts of histamine or just pure water.
...But that’s not all. The “phantom” histamine solutions and controls were prepared in three separate labs that weren’t involved in the experiments at all. The entire experiment was coordinated by an independent researcher who coded all solutions and collected results but took no part in testing or analyzing the experiment’s outcomes. Hence, there’s little room for fraud or self-suggestion here. So when the results came in, they were a complete surprise. Three out of the four labs involved reported statistically significant inhibition of basophil degranulation by “phantom” histamine solutions compared to controls. The fourth lab yielded a nearly significant result, so overall all four labs showed positive results for “phantom” histamine solutions.
...Yet Professor Ennis still wasn’t satisfied. “In this trial we stained the basophils and then manually counted those that remained colored after histamine inhibited the reaction. One could argue that human error might have crept in at this stage of the experimental protocol.” She thus employed a previously developed basophil counting method that could be fully automated, involving marking activated basophils with a monoclonal antibody, which could be observed via a fluorescence reaction measured by a machine. The results, soon to be published in Inflammation Research, proved identical to the earlier ones: histamine solutions at pharmacological concentrations and at very high dilutions induced statistically significant inhibition of anti-IgE-induced basophil activation, confirming previous findings in this area. “Despite my reservations about homeopathic science,” says Ennis, “these results compel me to accept what initially seemed totally implausible and to start seeking a rational explanation for our findings.”
...Jacques Benveniste’s commentary: “They’ve arrived exactly where we were twelve years ago.” Benveniste believes he already knows what constitutes the effect of “water memory” and claims he can record signals from biochemical substances and transmit them across the world via the Internet. These signals, he asserts, induce changes in biological tissues as if the substance itself were actually present. If Benveniste and Ennis are right, the implications for science could be revolutionary, requiring a complete overhaul of how we understand chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology. One thing seems certain: either Benveniste will now be taken out of the “closet” where he was confined, or Professor Ennis and the other scientists involved in the pan-European experiment may end up joining him there....
Benveniste’s remarks:
1 – Note that negative results are instantly published by Nature, while positive results, published in decent but secondary journals, obviously go completely unnoticed. This is a veritable disinformation campaign, probably one of the largest in the history of science.
2 – The journalist was swayed because, in line with the usual trajectory of science, our results provide one more element for understanding molecular interactions, decoding the language of molecules, without changing anything in the current state of chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology.