Science: The Water That Lost Its Memory

A controversial scientific finding is debunked

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SCIENCE FRICTION, acidly quipped one Paris newspaper. Across the English Channel in London, Britain's New Scientist magazine howled, NATURE SENDS IN THE GHOST BUSTERS TO SOLVE RIDDLE OF THE ANTIBODIES. After a month of heated controversy and speculation, the curtain fell last week, at least for now, on one of the strangest tales of scientific controversy in recent memory. The story became public on June 30, when the prestigious British science journal Nature published a report, hedged with "editorial reservation," on a phenomenon that defied the laws of physics and molecular biology: water apparently retained a "memory" of some molecules it once contained in solution. When such water was mixed with blood cells, that phantom memory seemingly caused a reaction.

Even Nature's editors had a hard time swallowing the results of the research, which was directed by Jacques Benveniste, a laboratory head at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. The initial findings were apparently reproduced by scientists in France, Canada, Israel and Italy. Nonetheless, the report was accompanied by an editorial by Editor John Maddox that was almost apologetic. "There are good and particular reasons," he wrote, "why prudent people should, for the time being, suspend judgment." Last week Nature forthrightly rejected the idea of water with a memory and relegated it to the deep freeze, along with other intriguing scientific "discoveries" that have not panned out under scrutiny.

Its demise was the work of a highly unusual investigative team that the magazine dispatched to Paris. Besides Maddox, the Nature group included James ("the Amazing") Randi, the scourge of clairvoyants, faith healers and spoon benders, and Walter Stewart, a free-lance fraud sleuth at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Their report was merciless: "The hypothesis that water can be imprinted with a memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful." The behavior of the weird water was only a delusion, they concluded, based on flawed experimentation. But the matter did not end there. Nature was still smarting from the criticism that it lent credence to the whole messy business by publishing the report in the first place.

The affair strained credulity from the outset, like the proverbial little man who wasn't there. Benveniste's researchers had diluted a solution of antibodies to such a degree that there was no likelihood that even a single molecule of the antibody remained. But, voila, when human white blood cells were exposed to the superdiluted solution, they apparently responded by releasing a chemical substance, as they would have if they had encountered the initial antibody solution. The effect only worked when the solution was shaken violently. Explained Benveniste: "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." Benveniste was comfortable with his findings but openly admitted that he could not explain the strange goings-on.

Nature's editors were duly skeptical. The magazine had printed, with disclaimers, some dubious reports in the past. In 1974, for example, Nature published a paper that claimed Psychic Uri Geller, since discredited by Randi, could predict dice throws a million times as accurately as chance would predict.

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