...even though it looks like it. I repost here without permission, because the claim is so paradigm-busting and consequential if true that it must have vast implications for many of the topics we usually discuss, including brain function and routes to AI:
>From The Independent Review, March 19th, 1999:
The memory of molecules
=======================
Can molecules communicate with each other,
exchanging information without being in physical
contact? French biologist Jacques Benveniste believes
so, but his scientific peers are still sceptical. By Lionel
Milgrom
Jacques Benveniste was once considered to be one of
France's most respected biologists, until he was cast
adrift from the scientific mainstream. His downfall
began in 1988 when he infuriated the scientific
community with experimental results which he took
as evidence to suggest that water has a memory. His
ideas were seized upon by homeopaths keen to find
support for their theories on highly diluted
medicines, but were condemned by scientific purists.
Now, Benveniste believes he has evidence to suggest
that it may one day be possible to transmit the
curative power of life-saving drugs around the world
- via the Internet.
It sounds like science fiction and Benveniste will
have a hard time convincing a deeply sceptical world
that he is right. Nevertheless, he began his campaign
last week when he announced the latest research to
come out of his Digital Biology Laboratory near Paris,
to a packed audience of scientists at the Pippard
Lecture Theatre at Cambridge University's Cavendish
Physics Laboratory. Benveniste suggested that the
specific effects of biologically active molecules such as
adrenalin, nicotine and caffeine, and the
immunological signatures of viruses and bacteria, can
be recorded and digitised using a computer
sound-card. A keystroke later, and these signals can be
winging their way across the globe, courtesy of the
Internet. Biological systems far away from their
activating molecules can then - he suggested - be
triggered simply by playing back the recordings.
Most scientists have dismissed Benveniste as being
on the fringe, although there were some famous
names in the audience last week, including Sir
Andrew Huxley, Nobel laureate and past president of
the Royal Society, and the physicist Professor Brian
Josephson, also a Nobel laureate. Benveniste started
by asking some apparently childish questions. If
molecules could talk, what would they sound like?
More specifically, can we eavesdrop on their
conversations, record them, and play them back? The
answer to these last three questions is, according to
Benveniste, a resounding "Oui!" He further suggested
that these "recordings" can make molecules respond
in the same way as they do when they react.
Contradicting the way biologists think biochemical
reactions occur, he claims molecules do not have to
be in close proximity to affect each other. "It's like
listening to Pavarotti or Elton John," Benveniste
explained. "We hear the sound and experience
emotions, whether they're live or on CD."
For example, anger produces adrenalin. When
adrenalin molecules bind to their receptor sites, they
set off a string of biological events that, among other
things, make blood vessels contract. Biologists say that
adrenalin is acting as a molecular signalling device
but, Benveniste asks, what is the real nature of the
signal? And how come the adrenalin molecules
specifically target their receptors and no others, at
incredible speed? According to Benveniste, if the
cause of such biochemical events were simply due to
random collisions between adrenalin molecules and
their receptors (the currently accepted theory of
molecular signalling), then it should take longer than
it does to get angry.
Benveniste became the bete noire of the French
scientific establishment back in 1988, when a paper he
had published in the science journal Nature was later
rubbished by the then editor, Sir John Maddox, and a
team that included a professional magician, James
Randi. With an international group of scientists from
Canada, France, Israel and Italy, Benveniste had
claimed that vigorously shaking water solutions of an
antibody could evoke a biological response, even
when that antibody was diluted out of existence.
Non-agitated solutions produced little or no effect.
Nature said that the results of the experiment that
produced the "ghostly antibodies" were, frankly,
unbelievable. The journal itself came in for criticism
for publishing the paper in the first place.
In his Nature paper, Benveniste reasoned that the
effect of dilution and agitation pointed to
transmission of biological information via some
molecular organisation going on in water. This
"memory of water" effect, as it was later known,
proved Benveniste's academic undoing. For while
the referees of his Nature paper could not fault
Benveniste's experimental procedures, they could not
understand his results. How, they asked, can a
biological system respond to an antigen when no
molecules of it can be detected in solution? It goes
against the accepted "lock-and-key" principle, which
states that molecules must be in contact and
structurally match before information can be
exchanged. Such thinking has dominated the
biological sciences for more than four decades, and is
itself rooted in the views of the 17th-century French
philosopher Rene Descartes.
Nature's attempted debunking exercise failed to find
evidence of fraud, but concluded that Benveniste's
research was essentially unreproducible, a claim he
has always denied. From being a respected figure in
the French biological establishment, Benveniste was
pilloried, losing his government funding and his
laboratory. Undeterred, he and his now-depleted
research team somehow continued to investigate the
biological effects of agitated, highly dilute solutions.
The latest results are, for biologists, even more
incredible than those in the 1988 Nature paper.
Physicists, however, should have less of a problem as
their discipline is based on fields (eg gravitational,
electromagnetic) which have well-established
long-range effects. If Benveniste's claims prove to be
true - which is far from certain - they could have
profound consequences, not least for medical
diagnostics.
Benveniste's explanation starts innocuously enough
with a musical analogy. Two vibrating strings close
together in frequency will produce a "beat". The
length of this beat increases as the two frequencies
approach each other. Eventually, when they are the
same, the beat disappears. This is the way musicians
tune their instruments, and Benveniste uses the
analogy to explain his water-memory theory. Thus,
all molecules are made from atoms which are
constantly vibrating and emitting infrared radiation
in a highly complex manner. These infrared
vibrations have been detected for years by scientists,
and are a vital part of their armoury of methods for
identifying molecules.
However, precisely because of the complexity of their
infrared vibrations, molecules also produce much
lower "beat" frequencies. It turns out that these beats
are within the human audible range (20 to 20,000
Hertz) and are specific for every different molecule.
Thus, as well as radiating in the infrared region,
molecules also broadcast frequencies in the same
range as the human voice. This is the molecular
signal that Benveniste detects and records.
If molecules can broadcast, then they should also be
able to receive. The specific broadcast of one
molecular species will be picked up by another,
"tuned" by its molecular structure to receive it.
Benveniste calls this matching of broadcast with
reception "co-resonance", and says it works like a
radio set. Thus, when you tune your radio to, say,
Classic FM, both your set and the transmitting station
are vibrating at the same frequency. Twitch the dial a
little, and you're listening to Radio 1: different
tuning, different sounds.
This, Benveniste claims, is how millions of biological
molecules manage to communicate at the speed of
light with their own corresponding molecule and no
other. It also explains why minute changes in the
structure of a molecule can profoundly alter its
biological effect. It is not that these tiny structural
changes make it a bad fit with its biological receptor
(the classical lock-and-key approach). The structural
modifications "detune" the molecule to its receptor.
What is more, and just like radio sets and receivers,
the molecules do not have to be close together for
communication to take place.
So what is the function of water in all this?
Benveniste explains this by pointing out that all
biological reactions occur in water. The water
molecules completely surround every other molecule
placed among them. A single protein molecule, for
example, will have a fan club of at least 10,000
admiring water molecules. And they are not just
hangers-on. Benveniste believes they are the agents
that in fact relay and amplify the biological signal
coming from the original molecule.
It is like a CD which, by itself, cannot produce a sound
but has the means to create it etched into its surface.
In order for the sound to be heard, it needs to be
played back through an electronic amplifier. And just
as Pavarotti or Elton John is on the CD only as a
"memory", so water can memorise and amplify the
signals of molecules that have been dissolved and
diluted out of existence. The molecules do not have
to be there, only their "imprint" on the solution in
which they are dissolved. Agitation makes the
memory.
So what do molecules sound like? "At the moment
we don't quite know," says Didier Guillonnet,
Benveniste's colleague at the Digital Research
Laboratory. "When we record a molecule such as
caffeine, for example, we should get a spectrum, but it
seems more like noise. However, when we play the
caffeine recording back to a biological system sensitive
to it, the system reacts. We are only recording and
replaying; at the moment we cannot recognise a
pattern." "But," Benveniste adds, "the biological
systems do. We've sent the caffeine signal across the
Atlantic by standard telecommunications and it's still
produced an effect."
The effect is measured on a "biological system" such
as a piece of living tissue. Benveniste claims, for
instance, that the signal from molecules of heparin - a
component of the blood-clotting system - slows down
coagulation of blood when transmitted over the
Internet from a laboratory in Europe to another in the
US. If true, it will undoubtedly earn Benveniste a
Nobel prize. If not, he will receive only more scorn.
Benveniste's ideas are revolutionary - many might
say heretical or misguided - and he is unlikely to
persuade his most ardent critics. Although his ideas
may seem plausible enough, he will win over his
enemies only if his results can be replicated by other
laboratories. So far this has not been done to the
satisfaction of his many detractors.
====================
posted by
Damien Broderick