CHAPTER FOUR
The Language of the Cell

In a white portakabin in Clamart, in the unfashionable outskirts of Paris, a tiny heart, propped atop a bit of purpose-built scaffolding, carried on beating.

It was being kept alive courtesy of a small team of French scientists, who administered the right combination of oxygen and carbon dioxide, part of the type of state-of-the-art surgical technique used for heart transplants. In this instance, there was no donor or recipient; the heart had long been divested of its owner, a prime male Hartley guinea pig, and the scientists were only interested in the organ itself and how it was about to react.

They’d applied acetylcholine and histamine, two known vasodilators, then atropine and mepyramine, both agonists to the others, and finally measured coronary flow, plus such mechanical changes as beat rate.

There were no surprises here. As expected, the histamine and acetylcholine produced increased blood flow in the coronary arteries, while the mepyramine and atropine inhibited it.

The only unusual aspect of the experiment was that the agents of change weren’t actually pharmacological chemicals but low-frequency waves of the electromagnetic signals of the cells recorded using a purpose-designed transducer and a computer equipped with a sound card. It was these signals, which take the form of electromagnetic radiation of less than 20 kilohertz, which were applied to the guinea pig heart, and were responsible for speeding it up, just as the chemicals themselves would.¹

The signal effectively could take the place of the chemicals, for the signal is the molecule’s signature. The scientific team, which had successfully substituted it for the original, were quietly aware of the explosive nature of their achievement. Through their efforts, the usual theories of molecular signaling and how cells ‘talk’ to each other had been profoundly modified.

They were beginning to demonstrate in the laboratory what Popp had just proposed - that each molecule in the universe had a unique frequency and the language it used to speak to the world was a resonating wave.

As Popp was pondering the larger implications of biophoton emissions, a French scientist had been examining the reverse: the effect of this light on individual molecules.

Popp believed that biophoton emissions orchestrated all bodily processes, and the French scientist was finding out the exquisite way in which it worked. The biophoton vibrations Popp had observed in the body caused molecules to vibrate and create their own signature frequency, which acted as its unique driving force and also its means of communication.

The French scientist had paused to listen to these tiny oscillations and heard the symphony of the universe. Every molecule of our bodies was playing a note that was being heard round the world.

This discovery represented a permanent and arduous detour in the career of French scientist Jacques Benveniste, which had, up until the 1980s, followed a distinguished, predictable arc. Benveniste, a doctor of medicine, had put in his residency in the Paris hospital system, and then moved into research into allergies, becoming a specialist in the mechanisms of allergy and inflammation.

He’d been appointed research director at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and distinguished himself by discovering PAF, or platelet activating factor, which is involved in the mechanism of allergies such as asthma.

At 50, Benveniste had the world at his feet. There was no doubt that he would look forward to international acclaim among the establishment. He was proud of being French in a field not necessarily well represented by his countrymen since Descartes. Rumours abounded about the possibility that Benveniste would be one of the few French biologists to be considered as a possible recipient for the Nobel prize.

His papers were among those most often cited by scientists at INSERM, a measure of distinction and standing. He’d even received the Silver Medal from CNRS, one of the most prestigious French scientific honors. Benveniste possessed craggy good looks, a regal bearing, and a rakish sense of humor, and he’d been married for 30 years.

Nevertheless, neither his marital status nor his present contentment in the slightest curbed a tendency to innocently flirt, an attribute that, as a Frenchman, he considered more or less mandatory.

And then, in 1984, this bright and assured future was accidentally derailed by what turned out to be a small error in computation. Benveniste’s laboratory at INSERM had been studying basophil degranulation - the reaction of certain white blood cells to allergens.

One day, Elisabeth Davenas, one of his best laboratory technicians, came to him and reported that she’d seen and recorded a reaction in the white blood cells, even though there had been too few molecules of the allergen in the solution.

This had all come about as the result of a simple error in calculation. She had thought the starting solution was more concentrated than it was. In diluting it to what she thought was the usual concentration, she had inadvertently diluted the solution to the point where very few of the original antigen molecules remained.

After examining the data, Jacques virtually shooed her out of his office.

The results you are claiming are impossible, he declared, because there are no molecules here.

‘You have been experimenting with water,’ he told her. ‘Go back and do the work over.’

It was only when she tried to repeat the experiment with the same dilution and came up with the same results that he realized that Elisabeth, a meticulous worker, might have stumbled onto something worth investigating.

For several weeks, Elisabeth kept returning to his office with the same inexplicable data, showing powerful biological effects from a solution so weakened that it couldn’t have enough of the antigen to have caused them, and Jacques attempted to come up with ever more far-fetched explanations to fit these results to some recognizable biological theory.

Perhaps it was the presence of a second antibody reacting later, or maybe the reaction to an undisclosed second antigen, he thought.

After observing these results, one of the tutors in his laboratory, a doctor who was also a homeopath, happened to remark that these experiments were quite similar to the principle of homeopathy. In that system of medicine, solutions of active substance are diluted to the point where there is virtually none of the original substance left, only its ‘memory’.

At the time, Jacques didn’t even know what homeopathy was - that’s how classical a doctor he was - but the research scientist in him had had his appetite sufficiently whetted.

He asked Elisabeth to dilute the solutions even more, so that absolutely none of the original active substance remained. In these new studies, no matter how dilute the solution, which was, by now, just plain water, Elisabeth kept getting consistent results, as if the active ingredient were still there.

Because of his background as an allergy specialist, Jacques had used a standard allergy test for his studies, the purpose of which was to effect a typical allergic response in human cells. He isolated basophils, a type of white blood cell which contains antibodies of immunoglobulin E (IgE) type on its surface. It is these cells which are responsible for hypersensitivity reactions in people with allergies.

Jacques chose IgE cells because they easily respond to allergens such as pollen or dust mites, releasing histamine from their intracellular granules, and also to certain anti-IgE antibodies.

If this kind of a cell is affected by something, you’re not likely to miss it. Another advantage of the IgE is that he could test their staining properties through a test he’d developed and patented at INSERM. Because basophils, like most cells, have a jelly-like appearance, when you’re studying them at a lab, you need to stain them in order to see them.

But staining, even with a standard dye such as toluidine blue, is subject to change, depending upon many factors - the health of the host, say, and the influence of other cells upon the original. When these IgE cells are exposed to anti-IgE antibodies, it changes their ability to absorb the dye. Anti-IgE has been referred to as a kind of ‘biological paint-stripper’ ² because its ability to inhibit the dye is so effective that it can virtually render the basophils invisible again.

The final logic in Benveniste’s choice of anti-IgE had to do with the fact that these particular molecules are especially big. If you are attempting to see if water retained its effect even when all anti-IgE molecules had been filtered out of it, there would be no chance that any of them might be accidentally left behind.

In the studies, conducted over four years between 1985 and 1989, and painstakingly recorded in the laboratory books of Elisabeth Davenas, Benveniste’s team created high dilutions of the anti-IgE by pouring one-tenth of the previous solution into the next tube and filling it up by adding nine parts of a standard solvent.

Each dilution was then vigorously shaken (or succussed, as it is technically known), as it is in homeopathic preparations. In total, the team used dilutions like these, of one part solution to nine parts solvent, then kept diluting until there was one part of solution to ninety-nine parts solvent and even one part solution to nine hundred and ninety-nine parts solvent.

Each one of the high dilutions was successively added to the basophils, which were then counted under the microscope.

To Jacques’ surprise, as much as anyone’s, they discovered that they were recording effects in inhibiting dye absorption by up to 66 per cent, even with dilutions watered down to one part in 1060. In later experiments, when the dilutions were serially diluted a hundred-fold, eventually to one part in 10120, where there was virtually no possibility that a single molecule of the IgE was left, the basophils were still affected.

The most unexpected phenomenon was yet to come. Although the potency of the anti-IgE was at its highest at concentrations of one part in 1000 (the third decimal dilution) and then started to decrease with each successive dilution, as you might logically expect, the experiment took a U-turn at the ninth dilution.

The effect of the highly dilute IgE began increasing at this point and continued to increase, the more it was diluted.³ As homeopathy had always claimed, the weaker the solution, the more powerful its effect.

Benveniste joined forces with five different laboratories in four countries, France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of whom were able to replicate his results.

The thirteen scientists then jointly published the results of their four-year collaboration in a 1988 edition of the highly prestigious Nature magazine, showing that if solutions of antibodies were diluted repeatedly until they no longer contained a single molecule of the antibody, they still produced a response from immune cells.⁴

The authors concluded that none of the molecules they’d started with were present in certain dilutions and that:

specific information must have been transmitted during the di-lution/shaking process. Water could act as a template for the molecule, for example, by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields... The precise nature of this phenomenon remains unexplained.

To the popular press, which pounced on the published paper, Benveniste had discovered ‘the memory of water’, and his studies were widely regarded as making a valid case for homeopathy. Benveniste himself realized that his results had repercussions far beyond any theory of alternative medicine.

If water were able to imprint and store information from molecules, this would have an impact on our understanding of molecules and how they ‘talk’ to one another in our bodies, as molecules in human cells, of course, are surrounded by water. In any living cell, there are ten thousand molecules of water for each molecule of protein.

Nature also undoubtedly understood the possible repercussions of this finding on the accepted laws of biochemistry.

The editor, John Maddox, had consented to publish the article, but he did so after taking an unprecedented step - placing an editorial addendum at the bottom of the article:

 

Editorial reservation
Readers of this article may share the incredulity of the many referees who have commented on several versions of it during the past several months.

 

The essence of the result is that an aqueous solution of an antibody retains its ability to evoke a biological response even when diluted to such an extent that there is a negligible chance of their being a single molecule in any sample.

There is no physical basis for such an activity. With the kind collaboration of Professor Benveniste, Nature has therefore arranged for independent investigators to observe repetitions of the experiments.

 

A report of this investigation will appear shortly.

In his own editorial, Maddox also invited readers to pick holes in the Benveniste study.⁵

Benveniste was a proud man, not afraid to wave a fist in the face of the Establishment. He was not only willing to stick his head above the parapet in choosing to publish in one of the most conservative journals in the whole of the scientific community, but then, when they doubted him, he eagerly snatched up the gauntlet they’d thrown down by agreeing to their request to reproduce his results at his laboratory.

Four days after publication, Maddox himself arrived with what Benveniste described as a scientific ‘fraud squad’, composed of Walter Stewart, a well-known quackbuster, and James Randi, a professional magician who tended to be called in to expose scientific work that had actually been arrived at by sleight of hand.

Were a magician, a journalist and a quackbuster the best possible team to assess the subtle changes in biological experimentation, wondered Benveniste. Under their watchful eye, Elisabeth Davenas performed four experiments, one blinded, all of which, Benveniste said, were successful.

Nevertheless, Maddox and his team disputed the findings and decided to change the experimental protocol and tighten the coding procedures, even, in a melodramatic gesture, taping the code to the ceiling. Stewart insisted on carrying out some of the experiments himself and changed some of their design even though, Benveniste claimed, he was untrained in these particular experiments.

Under their new protocol, and amid a charged atmosphere implying that the INSERM team were hiding something, three more tests were done and shown not to work.

At this point, Maddox and his team had their results and promptly left, first asking for photocopies of 1500 of Benveniste’s papers.

Soon after their five-day visit, Nature published a report entitled ‘High dilution experiments a delusion’. It claimed that Benveniste’s lab had not observed good scientific protocol. It discounted supporting data from other labs. Maddox expressed surprise that the studies didn’t work all the time, when this is standard in biological studies - one reason Benveniste had conducted more than 300 trials before publishing.

The Maddox judgment also failed to note that the staining test is highly sensitive and can be tipped with the slightest change in experimental condition, so that some donor blood isn’t affected by even high concentrations of anti-IgE.

They expressed dismay that two of Benveniste’s co-authors were being funded by a manufacturer of homeopathic medicines. Industry funding is standard in scientific research, countered Benveniste. Were they implying that the results were altered to please the sponsor?

Benveniste fought back with an impassioned response and a plea for scientific open-mindedness:

Salem witchhunts or McCarthy-like prosecutions will kill science. Science flourishes only in freedom... The only way definitively to establish conflicting results is to reproduce them. It may be that all of us are wrong in good faith. This is no crime but science as usual.⁶

Nature’s results had a devastating effect upon Benveniste’s reputation and his position at INSERM.

A scientific council of INSERM censured his work, claiming in near unanimous statements that he should have performed other experiments,

‘before asserting that certain phenomena have escaped two hundred years of chemical research.’⁷

INSERM refused to listen to Benveniste’s objections about the quality of the Nature investigation and prevented him from continuing.

Rumors circulated about mental imbalance and fraud. Letters poured in to Nature and other publications, calling his work ‘dubious science’, a ‘cruel hoax’ and ‘pseudo-science’.⁸

Benveniste was given several chances to gracefully bow out of this work and no professional reason to continue to pursue it. By standing by his original work, he was certain to destroy the career he’d been building. Benveniste had got to the top of his position at INSERM and had no desire to be director. He’d never had ambition for a career, but only wished to carry on with his research.

By that time, he also felt he had no choice - the genie was already out of the bottle. He had uncovered evidence that demolished everything he had been taught to believe about cell communication, and there was now no turning back.

But also there was the undeniable thrill of it. Here was the most compelling research he could think of, the most explosive of results he could imagine. This was like, as he enjoyed putting it, peering under the skirt of nature.

Benveniste left INSERM, and sought support from private sources such as DigiBio, which enabled him and Didier Guillonnet, a gifted engineer from École Centrale Paris, who joined him in 1997, to carry on their work. After the Nature fiasco, they moved on to ‘digital biology’, a discovery they made not in a single moment of inspiration, but after eight years of following a logical trail of cautious experimentation.⁹

The memory of water studies had prompted Benveniste to examine the manner in which molecules communicate within a living cell. In all aspects of life, molecules must speak to each other. If you are excited, your adrenals pump out more adrenaline, which must tell specific receptors to get your heart to beat faster.

The usual theory, called the Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR), is that two molecules that match each other structurally exchange specific (chemical) information, which occurs when they bump into each other. It’s rather like a key finding its own keyhole (which is why this theory is often also called the key–keyhole, or lock-and-key interaction model).

Biologists still adhere to the mechanistic notions of Descartes that there can only be reaction through contact, some sort of impulsive force. Although they accept gravity, they reject any other notions of action at a distance.

If these occurrences are due to chance, there’s very little statistical hope of their happening, considering the universe of the cell. In the average cell, which contains one molecule of protein for every ten thousand molecules of water, molecules jostle around the cell like a handful of tennis balls floating about in a swimming pool.

The central problem with the current theory is that it is too dependent upon chance and also requires a good deal of time. It can’t begin to account for the speed of biological processes, like anger, joy, sadness or fear.

But if instead each molecule has its own signature frequency, its receptor or molecule with the matching spectrum of features would tune into this frequency, much as your radio tunes into a specific station, even over vast distances, or one tuning fork causes another tuning fork to oscillate at the same frequency. They get in resonance - the vibration of one body is reinforced by the vibration of another body at or near its frequency.

As these two molecules resonate on the same wavelength, they would then begin to resonate with the next molecules in the biochemical reaction, thus creating, in Benveniste’s words, a ‘cascade’ of electromagnetic impulses travelling at the speed of light. This, rather than accidental collision, would better explain how you initiate a virtually instantaneous chain reaction in biochemistry.

It also is a logical extension of the work of Fritz Popp. If photons in the body excite molecules along the entire spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies, it is logical that they would have their own signature frequency.

Benveniste’s experiments decisively demonstrated that cells don’t rely on the happenstance of collision but on electromagnetic signaling at low frequency (less than 20 kHz) electromagnetic waves. The electromagnetic frequencies that Benveniste has studied correspond with frequencies in the audio range, even though they don’t emit any actual noise that we can detect.

All sounds on our planet - the sound of water rippling in a stream, a crack of thunder, a shot fired, a bird chirping - occur at low frequency, between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, the range in which the human ear can hear.

According to Benveniste’s theory, two molecules are then tuned into each other, even at long distance, and resonate to the same frequency. These two resonating molecules would then create another frequency, which would then resonate with the next molecule or group of molecules, in the next stage of the biological reaction.

This would explain, in Benveniste’s view, why tiny changes in a molecule - the switching of a peptide, for example - would have a radical effect on what that molecule actually does.

This is not so farfetched, considering what we already know about how molecules vibrate. Both specific molecules and intermolecular bonds emit certain specific frequencies which can be detected billions of light-years away, through the most sensitive of modern telescopes. These frequencies have long been accepted by physicists, but no one in the biological community save Fritz-Albert Popp and his predecessors has paused to consider whether they actually have some purpose.

Others before Benveniste, such as Robert O. Becker and Cyril Smith, had conducted extensive experimentation on electromagnetic frequencies in living things.

Benveniste’s contribution was to show that molecules and atoms had their own unique frequencies by using modern technology both to record this frequency and to use the recording itself for cellular communication.

From 1991, Benveniste demonstrated that you could transfer specific molecular signals simply by using an amplifier and electromagnetic coils. Four years later, he was able to record and replay these signals using a multimedia computer. Over thousands of experiments, Benveniste and Guillonnet recorded the activity of the molecule on a computer and replayed it to a biological system ordinarily sensitive to that substance.

In every instance, the biological system has been fooled into thinking it has been interacting with the substance itself and acted accordingly, initiating the biological chain reaction, just as it would if in the actual presence of the genuine molecule.¹⁰

Other studies have also shown that Benveniste’s team could erase these signals and stop activity in the cells through an alternating magnetic field, work they performed in collaboration with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Medudon, France.

The inescapable conclusion:

as Fritz-Albert Popp theorized, molecules speak to each other in oscillating frequencies. It appeared that the Zero Point Field creates a medium enabling the molecules to speak to each other nonlocally and virtually instantaneously.

The DigiBio team tested out digital biology on five types of studies:

basophilic activation; neutrophilic activation; skin testing; oxygen activity; and, most recently, plasma coagulation.

Like whole blood, plasma, the yellowy liquid of the blood, which carries protein and waste products, will coagulate.

To control for that ability, you must first remove the calcium in the plasma, by chelating - chemically grabbing - it. If you then add water with calcium to the blood, it will coagulate, or clot. Adding heparin, a classic anti-coagulant drug, will prevent the blood from clotting, even in the presence of the calcium.

In Benveniste’s most recent study, he took a test-tube of this plasma with calcium chelated out, then added water containing calcium which has been exposed to the ‘sound’ of heparin transmitted via the signature digitized electromagnetic frequency. As with all his other experiments, the signature frequency of heparin works as though the molecules of heparin itself were there: in its presence, the blood is more reluctant than usual to coagulate.

In perhaps the most dramatic of his experiments, Benveniste showed that the signal could be sent across the world by email or mailed on a floppy disk.

Colleagues of his at Northwestern University in Chicago recorded signals from ovalbumin (Ova), acetylcholine (Ach), dextran and water. The signals from the molecules were recorded on a purpose-designed transducer and a computer equipped with a sound card.

The signal was then recorded on a floppy disk and sent by regular mail to the DigiBio Laboratory in Clamart. In later experiments, the signals were also sent by email as attached documents. The Clamart team then exposed ordinary water to the signals of this digital Ova or Ach or ordinary water and infused either the exposed water or the ordinary water to isolated guinea pig hearts.

All the digitised water produced highly significant changes in coronary flow, compared with the controls - which just contained ordinary, non-exposed water. The effects from the digitized water were identical to effects produced on the heart by the actual substances themselves.¹¹

Giuliano Preparata and his colleague Emilio Del Giudice, two Italian physicists at the Milan Institute for Nuclear Physics, were working on a particularly ambitious project - to explain why certain matter in the world stays in one piece.

Scientists understand gases to a large extent through the laws of classical physics, but are still largely ignorant of the actual workings of liquids and solids - that is, any sort of condensed matter. Gases are easy because they consist of individual atoms or molecules which behave individually in large spaces. Where scientists have trouble is with atoms or molecules packed tightly together and how they behave as a group.

Any physicist is at a loss to tell you why water doesn’t just evaporate into gas or why atoms in a chair or a tree stay that way, particularly if they are only supposed to communicate with their most immediate neighbor and be held together by short-range forces.¹²

Water is among the most mysterious of substances, because it is a compound formed from two gases, yet it is liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. In their studies, Del Giudice and Preparata have demonstrated mathematically that when closely packed together, atoms and molecules exhibit a collective behavior, forming what they have termed ‘coherent domains’.

They are particularly interested in this phenomenon as it occurs in water. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Preparata and Del Giudice demonstrated that water molecules create coherent domains, much as a laser does.

Light is normally composed of photons of many wavelengths, like colors in a rainbow, but photons in a laser have a high degree of coherence, a situation akin to a single coherent wave, like one intense color.¹³

These single wavelengths of water molecules appear to become ‘informed’ in the presence of other molecules - that is, they tend to polarize around any charged molecule - storing and carrying its frequency so that it may be read at a distance.

This would mean that water is like a tape recorder, imprinting and carrying information whether the original molecule is still there or not. The shaking of the containers, as is done in homeopathy, appears to act as a method of speeding up this process.¹⁴

So vital is water to the transmission of energy and information that Benveniste’s own studies actually demonstrate that molecular signals cannot be transmitted in the body unless you do so in the medium of water.¹⁵

In Japan, a physicist called Kunio Yasue of the Research Institute for Information and Science, Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, also found that water molecules have some role to play in organizing discordant energy into coherent photons - a process called ‘superradiance’.¹⁶

This suggests that water, as the natural medium of all cells, acts as the essential conductor of a molecule’s signature frequency in all biological processes and that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which can be imprinted wave information. If Benveniste is right, water not only sends the signal but also amplifies it.

The most important aspect of scientific innovation is not necessarily the original discovery, but the people who copy the work. It is only the replication of initial data that legitimizes your research and convinces the orthodox scientific community that you might be onto something. Despite the virtually universal derision of Benveniste’s results by the Establishment, reputable research slowly began to appear elsewhere.

In 1992, FASEB (the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) held a symposium, organized by the International Society for Bioelectricity, examining the interactions of electromagnetic fields with biological systems.¹⁷

Numerous other scientists have replicated high-dilution experi-ments,¹⁸ and several others have endorsed and successfully repeated experiments using digitized information for molecular communication.19

Benveniste’s latest studies were replicated eighteen times in an independent lab in Lyon, France, and in three other independent centers.

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 centers 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 signaling 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.

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