Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the ‘memory of water’, died in Paris on 3 October. He will definitely be remembered for the phrase his work inspired, which has turn into the title of a play and a rock tune, as well as a determine of everyday speech. However his controversial profession additionally highlighted the tough problem of the best way to deal with research on the fringes of science, a question with which Nature itself grew to become intimately entangled. In France, Benveniste was a celeb, and it is not hard to see why. He was a charismatic showman who knew how to wield a rhetorical foil. His speak of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and ‘Galileo-type prosecutions’ played effectively with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, trendy-day Inquisition. He conjured up pictures of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a floor-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties. He was, he instructed, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism.

Again in 1988, however, Benveniste was very a lot part of the establishment. He was the senior director of the French medical research group INSERM's Unit 200, in Clamart, which studied the immunology of allergy and inflammation. That was when he sent his infamous paper to Nature1. In it, he reported that white blood cells called basophils, which management the body's response to allergens, may be activated to supply an immune response by options of antibodies which have been diluted thus far that they include none of those biomolecules in any respect. It was as if the water molecules someway retained a memory of the antibodies that that they had beforehand been involved with, so that a biological impact remained when the antibodies had been no longer current. This, it seemed, validated the claims made for extremely diluted homeopathic medicines. After a prolonged evaluation process, through which the referees insisted on seeing evidence that the impact might be duplicated in three other unbiased laboratories, Nature printed the paper.

Naturally, the paper prompted a sensation. Newsweek. But no one, including Benveniste, gave much consideration to the vital question of how such a ‘Memory Wave Audio’ impact may very well be produced. The concept water molecules, related by hydrogen bonds that last for only about a picosecond (10-12 seconds) before breaking and reforming, might in some way cluster into lengthy-lived mimics of the antibody appeared absurd. Different teams had been subsequently unable to repeat the impact, and the unbiased results that the reviewers had requested for had been never printed. Further experiments carried out by Benveniste's staff, in double-blind conditions overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, did not confirm the unique outcomes. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-based company he arrange within the wake of the controversy, he devised one other clarification for his strange outcomes. Biomolecules, he said, communicate with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic alerts, which the receptors decide up like radios tuned to a selected wavelength.

Benveniste claimed that he was in a position to document these signals digitally, and that by taking part in them again to cells within the absence of the molecules themselves he might reproduce their biochemical effect, including triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells2. The questions this raises are, after all, infinite. Why, if that is the way biomolecules work, do they bother with shape complementarity in any respect? How might 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 one way or the other entails the ‘quantum-coherent domains’ proposed in a paper3 that now appears to be invoked at any time when water's ‘weirdness’ is at subject - for instance, to clarify cold fusion. The small print weren't, Benveniste stated, his accountability. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. However his failure to simplify his experimental system in order that he could clarify the precise nature of the consequences he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell wanting rigorous science.