Since the beginning of the "memory of water" affair,
that is upon our first exchanges with the magazine
Nature in 1986,
we have been constantly asked whether these strange results have been
reproduced elsewhere, these beforehand reproductions being a pre-requisite
for publishing these results. This demand is illegitimate since it is contrary
to a scientific practice so well established that one may consider that it
belongs to the deontology of research. According to the peer-review system,
an article which has been submitted to several scientific experts and whose
facts seem experimentally solid, according to state-of-the-art practice,
must be published. The presented results are *then* reproduced or
not by other researchers. Now, those results that we published in
Nature
ignited such an international scandal that nobody would spontaneously dare
to attempt to replicate them. However they were reproduced in the following
conditions:
Before the Nature article was printed, four laboratories in the world,
a French one, who declined to be identified later, an Israeli, a Canadian and an Italian,
whose members have signed the Nature article, had reproduced
the effect of high dilutions on basophil degranulation.
It is remarkable that in the following controversy these labs were not
investigated. For those who had decided once and for all not to take these
results into account, it was obviously embarrassing to mention these initial
replications. In January 1989 another French university laboratory publicly
declared that they found the same data.
In 1990-91, the experiments of activation and inhibition of basophil degranulation
were reproduced in our laboratory under the direct supervision of a highly reputed
team of statisticians. These results were published in 1991 in
the Comptes-Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences de Paris.
Two attempts of replication "failed" and were therefore immediately
published by Nature
(Hirst et al., vol. 366, p. 525, 1993; Wiegant, vol. 370, p. 314, 1994).
The set-up of the latter was not supervised by us and we are therefore not certain of the quality of the work.
We commented (Nature, vol. 370, p. 314, 1994) the profound modifications
of our protocol by Hirst et al., all capable of considerably lowering the sensitivity of the method.
Here again, and contrarily to basic deontological rules, the attempt of reproduction
was done without any collaboration or even communication with our laboratory. We learnt of it by reading the
Hirst's paper in Nature. Since no raw data appeared in the latter article we asked the authors to provide them,
with no avail. Furthermore, one can find in the core of this article "strange" effects with resemble
our data. Yet the authors state that "of course (they) do not lend any support to (our) findings".
See a thorough
in
analysis of Hirst's paper
and
some comments
on the Memory of Water controversy
from
Dr. Italo Vecchi's website.
Similar experiments were performed again in the mid-nineties in four European laboratories under
the leadership of Professor Robertfroid from the University of Louvain (Belgium) who declared to the journal
Le Monde in January 1997 that the technical conditions were such that no
artefact or cheating were possible. Three-thousand-six-hundred experiments
confirmed beyond discussion the validity of the effect at high dilution.
These experiments have not been published under proper scientific format but Robertfroid' declarations to
Le Monde binds him personally and nobody discuss his professional and ethical level. Nevertheless
Nature was prompt to publish the "negative" experiment of Hirst and Wiegant but nothing
is said on Robertfroid’s statement. These results were recently presented at an international meeting
(Inflamm. Res. 1999, 48, Suppl. 1, S17-S18).
In 1996, a team from the Chicago Northwestern University recorded on a computer 29 biological activities,
half active and half controls, and then transferred them to us blind via Internet. We have correctly detected
these biological activities 29 times out of 29 with a highly significant difference between the group "control"
and the group "active" (p = e-17, Student t test for paired variables);
(J. Allergy Clin. Immunol. 1997, 99, s175 abs.). It is worth to note that this Chicago experiment necessitated several
months of fine tuning in order to eliminate all variables capable of interfering with the recording of an electromagnetic
molecular activity. These problems, that are built in all research and moreover in ground-breaking research, explain
some of the difficulties we have met when reproducing the recording process. But this does not allow to dismiss the
fact that an electromagnetic activity is capable, in our usual experimental conditions, to activate a sensitive
biological system.
More recently, we have submitted an article to a high level immunology journal
(The Journal of Immunology) on the transmission via an amplifier of a biological
activity to human cells.
To this article were joined two affidavits, one from a French laboratory testifying
that they supervised and blinded the experiments we did in this laboratory;
the other from an American laboratory testifying that they did these experiments
from the beginning to the end without any physical participation on our part,
resulting in the detection of the effect that we first described.
In spite of excellent reviews by the referees, the article was finally turned down,
on flimsy arguments, after about three years of back and forth exchanges.
One of the last minute referee, obviously called in for the purpose of rejecting the
article, stated unabashedly: "Some direct evidence that even a few molecules of
PMA are transferred is essential to support
the author’s claims". (!?!?!?!?, undiluted).
What is the evidence that "a few molecules" of Sinatra are present
in the room when one plays My Way from a CD? Follow 8 paragraphs of the same level.
Following our hypothesis of a contamination of the saline for i.v. injection
- this contamination looking like a bacterial endotoxin, most probably
electromagnetic and not molecular - an official inquiry, once again done
without our cooperation and in deplorable technical conditions, by the
Agence Française du Médicament (the French FDA) found
the same result as ours, indeed weak but statistically significant.
It is worth noting that a positive control, normally very toxic for the biological
system, had itself a very weak activity which clearly points out the wrong methodology
used in this study.
Thirty-seven references from peer-reviewed journals can be found in the scientific
literature on the effect of high dilutions (The list can be sent upon demand.
Also see The Memory of Water by M. Schiff, Thorsons Ed., 1995).
All this indicates that our results are reproducible, at least as reproducible as usual biological results that are most often dependent on the variations in the methods and in the biological material, the variability of which is obvious to any biologist. The Chicago experiment is especially clear-cut in this respect. Despite of all this, we are repeatedly asked the same question since ten years: "Were your results reproduced elsewhere ?".
Again, this demand can be understood given the continuous disinformation on this research (we are here in the realm of the Rumor), yet it is scientifically illegitimate. However we are obliged to answer this question because of the prevailing circumstances. This is what we have done year after year. This is what we are still doing* but meanwhile it should not be possible anymore to any honest person to ask again and again whether these results that were reproduced numerous times were indeed reproduced, and much less to affirm, sometimes publicly, that they are not reproducible. Except if these people are led by a dogmatic ideology...
Jacques Benveniste
October 20, 1997
* April 1999: A method for replicating "the memory of water", that can be used by any scientist, is now proposed on our web site. An even simpler method which detects the digital signal specific of molecules has recently been set up. It will be diffused in the months to come. The end of the affair is now coming soon.