Water: Memory And Myth
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Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', died in Paris on 3 October. He will certainly be remembered for the phrase his work inspired, which has become the title of a play and a rock song, as well as a figure of everyday speech.
It was as though the water molecules somehow retained a memory of the antibodies that they had previously been in contact with, so that a biological effect remained when the antibodies were no longer present. This, it seemed, validated the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines.
Naturally, the paper caused a sensation. "Homeopathy finds scientific support," claimed Newsweek. But no one, including Benveniste, gave much attention to the critical question of how such a 'memory' effect could be produced.
How could a molecule act as an antenna for electromagnetic wavelengths of several kilometres? And how does the memory of water fit into all of this? Benveniste proposes that transmission of the signal somehow involves the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper3 that now seems to be invoked whenever water's 'weirdness' is at issue - for example, to explain cold fusion.
But the fact that it is the 'memory of water', not 'digital biology', that he will be remembered for illustrates a point that I think Jacques failed to appreciate: his work tapped into a potent and persistent cultural myth about the miraculous properties of water. And under the influence of myth, it can be hard to keep a level head.
Water memory is the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances previously dissolved in it even after an arbitrary number of serial dilutions. It has been claimed to be a mechanism by which homeopathic remedies work, even when they are diluted to the point that no molecule of the original substance remains, but there is no evidence for it.
Water memory contradicts current scientific understanding of physical chemistry and is generally not accepted by the scientific community. In 1988, Jacques Benveniste published a study supporting a water memory effect amid controversy in Nature,[1] accompanied by an editorial by Nature's editor John Maddox[2] urging readers to "suspend judgement" until the results could be replicated. In the years after publication, multiple supervised experiments were made by Benveniste's team, the United States Department of Defense,[3] BBC's Horizon programme,[4] and other researchers, but no one has ever reproduced Benveniste's results under controlled conditions.
Nonetheless, they reported, human basophils responded to the solutions just as though they had encountered the original antibody (part of the allergic reaction). The effect was reported only when the solution was shaken violently during dilution.[6] Benveniste stated: "It's like agitating a car key in the river, going miles downstream, extracting a few drops of water, and then starting one's car with the water."[7] At the time, Benveniste offered no theoretical explanation for the effect, which was later coined as "water memory" by a journalist reporting on the study.[8][self-published source?]
While Benveniste's study demonstrated a mechanism by which homeopathic remedies could operate, the mechanism defied scientific understanding[clarification needed] of physical chemistry.[7][9][10] A paper about hydrogen bond dynamics[11] is mentioned by some secondary sources[12][13] in connection to the implausibility of water memory.
Under supervision of Maddox and his team, Benveniste and his team of researchers followed the original study's procedure and produced results similar to those of the first published data. Maddox, however, noted that during the procedure, the experimenters were aware of which test tubes originally contained the antibodies and which did not. Benveniste's team then started a second, blinded experimental series with Maddox and his team in charge of the double-blinding: notebooks were photographed, the lab videotaped, and vials juggled and secretly coded. Randi even went so far as to wrap the labels in newspaper, seal them in an envelope, and then stick them on the ceiling. This was done so that Benveniste and his team could not read them.[15] The blinded experimental series showed no water memory effect.
Maddox's team published a report on the supervised experiments in the next issue (July 1988) of Nature.[16] Maddox's team concluded "that there is no substantial basis for the claim that anti-IgE at high dilution (by factors as great as 10120) retains its biological effectiveness, and that the hypothesis that water can be imprinted with the memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful." Maddox's team initially speculated that someone in the lab "was playing a trick on Benveniste",[7] but later concluded that, "We believe the laboratory has fostered and then cherished a delusion about the interpretation of its data." Maddox also pointed out that two of Benveniste's researchers were being paid by the French homeopathic company Boiron.[16]
Third-party attempts at replication of the Benveniste experiment to date have failed to produce positive results that could be independently replicated. In 1993, Nature published a paper describing a number of follow-up experiments that failed to find a similar effect,[29] and an independent study published in Experientia in 1992 showed no effect.[30] An international team led by Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University of Belfast claimed in 1999 to have replicated the Benveniste results.[31][32] Randi then forwarded the $1 million challenge to the BBC Horizon program to prove the "water memory" theory following Ennis's experimental procedure. In response, experiments were conducted with the vice-president of the Royal Society, John Enderby, overseeing the proceedings. The challenge ended with no memory effect observed by the Horizon team.[4] For a piece on homeopathy, the ABC program 20/20 also attempted, unsuccessfully, to reproduce Ennis's results.[33] Ennis has claimed that these tests did not follow her own experiment protocols.[34]
To most scientists, the "memory of water" is not something that deserves serious consideration; the only evidence is the flawed Benveniste work. By contrast, the notion of "memory of water" has been taken seriously among homeopaths. For them, it seemed to be part of a possible explanation of why some of their remedies might work. An overview of the issues surrounding the memory of water was the subject of a special issue of Homeopathy. In an editorial, the editor of Homeopathy, Peter Fisher, acknowledged that Benveniste's original method does not yield reproducible results and declared "...the memory of water is a bad memory: it casts a long shadow over homeopathy and is just about all that many scientists recall about the scientific investigation of homeopathy, equating it with poor or even fraudulent science." The issue was an attempt to restore some credibility to the notion with articles proposing various, very different theories of water memory, such as: electromagnetic exchange of information between molecules, breaking of temporal symmetry, thermoluminescence, entanglement described by a new quantum theory, formation of hydrogen peroxide, clathrate formation, etc. Some of the proposed mechanisms would require overthrowing much of 20th century physics.[40]
Prior research has already chipped away at the dehydrating myth. For instance, one study found that caffeine didn't hinder hydration among athletes who consumed caffeinated beverages to rehydrate throughout practices in the heat.
Reality: As people age, it's normal to have occasional memory problems, such as forgetting the name of a person you've recently met. However, Alzheimer's is more than occasional memory loss. It's a disease that causes brain cells to malfunction and ultimately die. When this happens, an individual may forget the name of a longtime friend or what roads to take to return to a home they've lived in for decades.
It can be difficult to tell normal memory problems from memory problems that should be a cause for concern. The Alzheimer's Association has developed information to help you tell the difference. If you or someone you know has memory problems or other problems with thinking and learning that concern you, contact a physician. Sometimes the problems are caused by medication side effects, vitamin deficiencies or other conditions and can be reversed with treatment. The memory and thinking problems may also be caused by another type of dementia.
Reality: Alzheimer's disease has no survivors. It destroys brain cells and causes memory changes, erratic behaviors and loss of body functions. It slowly and painfully takes away a person's identity, ability to connect with others, think, eat, talk, walk and find his or her way home.
The first is that a homeopathic substance, even diluted to the point that it no longer can be detected by even the finest instruments in a sample of water, changes the structure of the hydrogen bonds in the water. Homeopaths term this supposed effect "water memory."
"I don't believe in water memory, because water molecules move. They're constantly rotating with respect to each other, forming hydrogen bonds, breaking hydrogen bonds," Nyman said. In other words, there's no structure in a solution of liquid water permanent enough to account for any long-term memory, she said.
Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, agreed. The idea "doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny," Sachleben told Live Science. Experiments that claim to prove water memory, or structure in water, can't be reproduced, he said.
If the water memory somehow survived contact with a homeopathy user's mouth, the memory would then face an even more destructive environment in the stomach, where the stomach's acid would have a huge impact on the hydrogen bonds in water, Sachleben said. 2b1af7f3a8