The secret life of moody cows!
SUNDAY TIMES : FEB 2005, by J Leake Science Editor
ONCE they were a byword for mindless docility. But cows have a secret mental life in which they bear grudges, nurture friendships and become excited over intellectual challenges, scientists have found.
Cows are also capable of feeling strong emotions such as pain, fear and even anxiety — they worry about the future.
But if farmers provide the right conditions, they can also feel great happiness.
The findings have emerged from studies of farm animals that have found similar traits in pigs, goats, chickens and other livestock. They suggest that such animals may be so emotional) similar to humans that welfare laws need to be rethought.
Christine Nicol professor of animal welfare at Bristol University- said even chickens may have to be treated as individuals with needs and problems.
"Remarkable cognitive abilities and cultural innovations have been revealed," she said- "Our challenge is to teach others that every animal we intend to eat or use is a complex individual, and to adjust our fanning culture accordingly."
Nicol will be presenting her findings to a scientific conference to be held in London next month by Compassion in World Farming) the animal welfare lobby group.
John Webster, professor of animal husbandry at Bristol, has just published a book on the topic. Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden. “People have assumed that intelligence is linked 10 the ability to suffer and that because animals have smaller brains they suffer less than humans. That is a pathetic piece of logic," he said.
Webster and his colleagues have documented how cows within a herd form smaller friendship groups of between two and four animals with whom they spend most of their time, often grooming and licking each other. They will also dislike other cows and can hear grudges for months or years.
Dairy cow herds can also be intensely sexual. Webster describes how the cows become excited when one of the herd comes into heat and start trying to mount her. "Cows look calm, but really they are gay nymphomaniacs," he said.
Donald Broom, professor of animal welfare at Cambridge University, who is presenting other research at the conference, will describe how cows can also become excited by solving intellectual challenges.
In one study, researchers challenged the animals with a task where they had to find how to open a door to get some food. An electroencephalograph was used to measure their brainwaves.
"Their brainwaves showed their excitement; their heartbeat went up and some even jumped into the air. We called it their
Eureka moment." said Broom.
The assumption that farm animals cannot suffer from conditions that would be considered intolerable for humans is partly based on the idea that they are less intelligent than people and have no "sense of self".
Increasingly, however, research reveals this to be untrue. Keith Kendrick, professor of neurobiology at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, has found that even sheep are far more complex than realised and can remember 50 ovine faces — even in profile. They can recognise another sheep after a year apart.
Kendrick has also described how sheep can form strong affections for particular humans, becoming depressed by long separations and greeting them enthusiastically even after three years.
The Compassion in World Farming conference will be opened with a keynote speech by Jane Goodall, the primatologist who founded the study of animal sentience with her research into chimpanzees the early 1960s.
Goodall overturned the then accepted belief that animals were simply automatons showing little individuality or emotions. It has taken many years, however, for scientists to accept that such ideas could be applied to a wide range of other animals.
"Sentient animals have the capacity to experience pleasure and are motivated to seek it," said Webster. "You only have to watch how cows and lambs both seek and enjoy pleasure when they lie with their heads raised to the sun on a perfect English summer's day. Just like humans."
WATER MEMORY articles...
Water Remembers? Homeopathy Explained?
New research suggests water remembers what has been dissolved in it, even after dilution beyond the point where no molecule of the original substances could remain. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports.
For more than a century, practitioners of homeopathy have used highly diluted solutions of medicinal substances to treat diseases. Some substances are diluted way beyond the point at which no trace of the original substances could remain. It is as though the water has retained memory of the departed molecules. This has aroused a great deal of scepticism within the conventional medical and scientific community. To this day, ‘homeopathic’ is used as a term of derision, to indicate something imagined that has no reality.
But a series of recent discoveries in the conventional scientific community is making people think again.
First, there were the South Korean chemists who discovered two years ago that molecules dissolved in water clump together as they get more diluted (see SiS 15), which was totally unexpected; and further more, the size of the clumps depends on the history of dilution, making a mockery of the ‘laws of chemistry’.
Now, physicist Louis Rey in Lausanne, Switzerland, has published a paper in the mainstream journal, Physica A, describing experiments that suggest water does have a memory of molecules that have been diluted away, as can be demonstrated by a relatively new physical technique that measures thermoluminescence.
In this technique, the material is ‘activated’ by irradiation at low temperature, with UV, X-rays, electron beams, or other high-energy sub-atomic particles. This causes electrons to come loose from the atoms and molecules, creating ‘electron-hole pairs’ that become separated and trapped at different energy levels.
Then, when the irradiated material is warmed up, it releases the absorbed energy and the trapped electrons and holes come together and recombine. This causes the release of a characteristic glow of light, peaking at different temperatures depending on the magnitude of the separation between electron and hole.
As a general rule, the phenomenon is observed in crystals with an ordered arrangement of atoms and molecules, but it is also seen in disordered materials such as glasses. In this mechanism, imperfections in the atomic/molecular lattice are considered to be the sites at which luminescence appears.
Rey decided to use the technique to investigate water, starting with heavy water or deuterium oxide that’s been frozen into ice at a temperature of 77K. The absolute temperature scale (degree K, after Lord Kelvin) is used in science. (The zero degree K is equivalent to –273 C, and deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen which is twice as heavy as hydrogen).
As the ice warms up, a first peak of luminescence appears near 120K, and a second peak near 166 K. Heavy water gives a much stronger signal than water. In both cases, samples that were not irradiated gave no signals at all.
For both water and heavy water, the relative intensity of the thermoluminescence depends on the irradiation dose. There has been a suggestion that peak 2 comes from the hydrogen-bonded network within ice, whereas peak 1 comes from the individual molecules. This was confirmed by looking at a totally different material that is known to present strong hydrogen bonds, which showed a similar glow in the peak 2 region, but nothing in peak 1.
Rey then investigated what would happen when he dissolved some chemicals in the water and diluted it in steps of one hundred fold with vigorous stirring (as in the preparation of homeopathic remedies), until he reached a concentration of 10 to the power -30 g per centilitre, and compare that to the control that has not had any chemical dissolved in it and diluted in the same way.
The samples were frozen and activated with irradiation as usual.
Much to his surprise, when lithium chloride, LiCl, a chemical that would be expected to break hydrogen bonds between water molecules was added, and then diluted away, the thermoluminescent glow became reduced, but the reduction of peak 2 was greater relative to peak 1. Sodium chloride, NaCl, had the same effect albeit to a lesser degree.
It appears, therefore, that substances like LiCl and NaCl can modify the hydrogen-bonded network of water, and that this modification remains even when the molecules have been diluted away.
The fact that this ‘memory’ remains, in spite of, or because of vigorous stirring or shaking at successive dilutions, indicates that the ‘memory’ is by no means static, but depends on a dynamic process, perhaps a collective quantum excitation of water molecules that has a high degree of stability (see "The strangeness of water and homeopathic memory", SiS 15).
Institute of Science in Society
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From the Institute of Science in Society -
3. The Strangeness of Water & Homeopathic ‘Memory’
Is there any reason for homeopathic remedies to work? Does the strangeness of water hold the key? Dr. Mae-Wan Ho describes recent ideas on how the quantum electrodynamic properties of water could provide the basis of homeopathic ‘memory’ and how one might investigate them.
Water is the most abundant substance on the surface of the earth and is the main constituent of all living organisms. The human body is about 65 percent water by weight, with some tissues such as the brain and the lung containing nearly 80 percent. The water in our body is almost completely tied up with proteins, DNA and other macromolecules in a liquid crystalline matrix that enables our body to work in a remarkably coherent and co-ordinated way (see "To science with love", this issue).
Although water is the most familiar of liquids, it is also the most mysterious. Water is densest at 4 C and expands on freezing at 0 C, which is why ice floats, fortunately for fish and other aquatic creatures.
The water molecule consists of an oxygen atom bonded to two hydrogen atoms (H2O). The water molecule has the shape of a tetrahedron, a three-dimensional triangle. The oxygen atom sits in the heart of the tetrahedron, the hydrogen atoms point at two of the four corners and two electron clouds point to the remaining opposite corners. The clouds of negative charge result from the atomic structures of oxygen and hydrogen and the way they combine in the water molecule.
Oxygen has eight negatively charged electrons disposed around its positively charged nucleus rather like layers of the onion, two in the inner shell and six in an outer shell. The inner shell’s capacity is filled, but the outer shell can hold as many as eight. Hydrogen has only one electron, so oxygen, by combining with two hydrogen atoms, completes its outer electron shell. The hydrogen’s electron is slightly more attracted to the oxygen nucleus than its own nucleus, which makes the water molecule polar, and it ends up with two clouds of slightly negative charge around the oxygen atom, and its two hydrogen atoms are left with slightly positive charges.
The positively charged hydrogen of each water molecule can attract the negatively charged oxygen of another, giving rise to a hydrogen-bond (H-bond) between molecules. Each molecule of water can form four H-bonds, two between the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atoms of two other molecules, and two between its oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms of other molecules. Ice is usually composed of a lattice of water molecules arranged with perfect tetrahedral geometry. In liquid water, however, the structure can be quite random and irregular. The actual number of H-bonds per liquid water molecule ranges from three to six, with an average of about 4.5. At ordinary temperatures, liquid water consists of dynamic clusters of 50 to 100 water molecules, in which the H-bonds are constantly making and breaking (or flickering). The tetrahedral H-bonded molecule also gives water a loosely packed structure compared with that of most other liquids, such as oils or liquid nitrogen.
Water offers eternal fascination for physicists and physical chemists, not the least of the reasons being that it enables DNA and all proteins to function properly in the living organism (see Box).
Water is the real medium of life
The importance of water to living processes derives not only from its ability to form hydrogen bonds with other water molecules, but especially from its capacity to interact with various types of biological molecules. Because of its polar nature, water readily interacts with other polar and charged molecules such as acids, salts, sugars and various regions of proteins and DNA. As a result of these interactions, water can dissolve those substances, which are consequently described as hydrophilic (water loving). In contrast water does not interact well with nonpolar molecules such as fats, oil and water don’t mix. Nonpolar molecules are hydrophobic (water-fearing).
Hydrophobic interactions in water are very important for protein folding, because the chain folds so as to keep the hydrophobic parts inside, and expose the hydrophilic parts on the surfaces next to water. Proteins only work when they are folded properly and when there is water around, when they become ‘plasticised’ or flexible.
The properties of water and its interactions with proteins and DNA have been extensively studied using molecular dynamic simulations. These computer simulations follow the motions of populations of molecules according to interactions between atoms within the molecules and between molecules.
Molecular dynamic simulations show that while polar molecules such as urea form hydrogen bonds with water and dissolve in it, water molecules either don’t mix at all with nonpolar substances such as fat and oil, or tend to form a cage around the molecules.
These simulations also show that water is integral to the structure and function of all macromolecules. Early attempts to create molecular dynamics of models of DNA failed because repulsive forces between the negatively charged phosphate groups in the DNA backbone cause the molecule to break up after only 50 picoseconds. (The 50 picoseconds are in terms of real time as experienced by the DNA, and would have taken hours, if not days of computer time.) In the late 1980s, Levitt and Miriam Hirshberg showed that when water molecules were included, the DNA double-helical structure was stabilised by the water molecules forming hydrogen bonds with the phosphate groups. Subsequent simulations showed that water interacts with nearly every part of the DNA’s double helix, including the base pairs.
In contrast, water does not penetrate deeply into the structures of proteins, whose hydrophobic regions are tucked within. So, protein-water simulations have focused on the protein surface, which is much less tightly packed than the protein interior. From experiments, we know that heat causes the alpha-helices (a predominant structural feature of proteins) to uncurl, but in early simulations without water, the helix remained intact. Only by adding water were Levitt and Valerie Daggett able to mimic an alpha helix’s actual behaviour.
Recent investigations in our own Institute are showing that water is integral to the liquid crystalline structure of living organisms. The liquid crystalline structure of organisms holds the key to rapid intercommunication within the organism and the perfect co-ordination of living processes.
While most physicists and biochemists are still trying to understand the interactions of water molecules in terms of classical mechanics, a number of physicists have begun to think of the quantum properties of water.
Conventionally, quantum properties are thought to belong to elementary particles of less than 10-10m, while the macroscopic world of our everyday life is ‘classical’, in that things in it behave according to Newton’s laws of motion. Between the macroscopic classical world and the microscopic quantum world is the mesoscopic domain, where the distinction is getting increasingly blurred. Indeed, physicists are discovering quantum properties in large collections of atoms and molecules in the nano-metre to micro-metre range, particularly when the molecules are packed closely together in the liquid phase.
Recently, chemists have made the surprising discovery that molecules form clusters that increase in size with dilution. These clusters measure several micro-metres in diameter. The increase in size occurs nonlinearly with dilution and it depends on history, flying in the face of classical chemistry (see "Molecules clump on dilution", this issue). Indeed, there is as yet no explanation for the phenomenon. It may well be another reflection of the strangeness of water that depends on its quantum properties.
In the mid-1990s, quantum physicists Del Giudice and Preparata and other colleagues in University of Milan, in Italy, argued that quantum coherent domains measuring 100nm in diameter could arise in pure water. They show how the collective vibrations of the water molecules in the coherent domain eventually become phase-locked to the fluctuations of the global electromagnetic field. In this way, long-lasting, stable oscillations could be maintained in the water.
One way in which ‘memory’ might be stored in water is through the excitation of long-lasting coherent oscillations specific to the substances in the homeopathic remedy dissolved in water. Interaction of water molecules with other molecules changes the collective structure of water, which would in turn determine the specific coherent oscillations that will develop. If these become stabilised and maintained by phase coupling between the global field and the excited molecules, then, even when the dissolved substances are diluted away, the water may still carry the coherent oscillations that can ‘seed’ other volumes of water on dilution.
The discovery that dissolved substances form increasingly large clusters is compatible with the existence of a coherent field in water that can transmit attractive resonance between the molecules when the oscillations are in phase, leading to clumping in dilute solutions. As the cluster of molecules increases in size, its electromagnetic signature is correspondingly amplified, reinforcing the coherent oscillations carried by the water.
But then, one should expect changes in some physical properties in the water that could be detectable.
Unfortunately, all attempts to detect such coherent oscillations by usual spectroscopic and nuclear magnetic resonance methods have yielded ambiguous results. This is not surprising, in view of the finding that cluster size of the dissolved molecules depends on the precise history of dilution rather than on concentration of the molecules (see "Molecules clump on dilution", this issue).
It is possible that despite variations in the cluster-size of the dissolved molecules and detailed microscopic structure of the water, a specificity of coherent oscillations may nonetheless exist. The failure of the usual detection methods is because they depend on measuring the microscopic properties of individual molecules, or of small aggregates. Instead, what is needed is a method for detecting collective global properties over many, many molecules. Some obvious possibilities that suggest themselves are measurements of freezing points and boiling points, viscosity, density, diffusivity, and magnetic properties.
One intriguing possibility for detecting changes in collective global properties of water that is not so obvious is by means of crystallisation. Crystals are formed from macroscopic collections of molecules. Like other measurements that depend on global properties, crystals amplify the subtle changes in individual molecules that would have been undetectable otherwise (see next article).
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From the New Scientist -
Icy claim that water has memory
19:00 11 June 2003
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
Claims do not come much more controversial than the idea that water might retain a memory of substances once dissolved in it. The notion is central to homeopathy, which treats patients with samples so dilute they are unlikely to contain a single molecule of the active compound, but it is generally ridiculed by scientists.
Holding such a heretical view famously cost one of France's top allergy researchers, Jacques Benveniste, his funding, labs and reputation after his findings were discredited in 1988.
Yet a paper is about to be published in the reputable journal Physica A claiming to show that even though they should be identical, the structure of hydrogen bonds in pure water is very different from that in homeopathic dilutions of salt solutions. Could it be time to take the "memory" of water seriously?
The paper's author, Swiss chemist Louis Rey, is using thermoluminescence to study the structure of solids. The technique involves bathing a chilled sample with radiation. When the sample is warmed up, the stored energy is released as light in a pattern that reflects the atomic structure of the sample.
Twin peaks
When Rey used the method on ice he saw two peaks of light, at temperatures of around 120 K and 170 K. Rey wanted to test the idea, suggested by other researchers, that the 170 K peak reflects the pattern of hydrogen bonds within the ice. In his experiments he used heavy water (which contains the heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium), because it has stronger hydrogen bonds than normal water.
Aware of homeopaths' claims that patterns of hydrogen bonds can survive successive dilutions, Rey decided to test samples that had been diluted down to a notional 10-30 grams per cubic centimetre - way beyond the point when any ions of the original substance could remain. "We thought it would be of interest to challenge the theory," he says.
Each dilution was made according to a strict protocol, and vigorously stirred at each stage, as homeopaths do. When Rey compared the ultra-dilute lithium and sodium chloride solutions with pure water that had been through the same process, the difference in their thermoluminescence peaks compared with pure water was still there (see graph).
"Much to our surprise, the thermoluminescence glows of the three systems were substantially different," he says. He believes the result proves that the networks of hydrogen bonds in the samples were different.
Phase transition
Martin Chaplin from London's South Bank University, an expert on water and hydrogen bonding, is not so sure. "Rey's rationale for water memory seems most unlikely," he says. "Most hydrogen bonding in liquid water rearranges when it freezes."
He points out that the two thermoluminescence peaks Rey observed occur around the temperatures where ice is known to undergo transitions between different phases. He suggests that tiny amounts of impurities in the samples, perhaps due to inefficient mixing, could be getting concentrated at the boundaries between different phases in the ice and causing the changes in thermoluminescence.
But thermoluminescence expert Raphael Visocekas from the Denis Diderot University of Paris, who watched Rey carry out some of his experiments, says he is convinced. "The experiments showed a very nice reproducibility," he told New Scientist. "It is trustworthy physics." He see no reason why patterns of hydrogen bonds in the liquid samples should not survive freezing and affect the molecular arrangement of the ice.
After his own experience, Benveniste advises caution. "This is interesting work, but Rey's experiments were not blinded and although he says the work is reproducible, he doesn't say how many experiments he did," he says. "As I know to my cost, this is such a controversial field, it is mandatory to be as foolproof as possible."
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Jacques Benveniste
was a French immunologist (March 12, 1935 - October 3, 2004). In 1979 he published in the French Compte rendus de l'Académie des Sciences a well-known paper where he contributes to the description of the structure of the platelet-activating factor and its relationships with histamine. He was head of INSERM's Unit 200 directed at "Immunology, allergy and inflammation". He was at the center of a major international controversy in 1988 when he published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature reporting on the action of very high dilutions of anti-immunoglobulin E on the degranulation of human basophils, a kind of white blood cell. Biologists were puzzled by these results as only molecules of water, and no molecules of the initial substance (anti-IgE) are expected to be found in these high dilutions. These results seem to indicate that the configuration of molecules in water may be biologically active. A journalist coined the term water memory for this hypothesis.
As a condition for publication, Nature asked for the results to be replicated by independent laboraties, which was done. The article was then published. A follow-up investigation of Benveniste's laboratory by a team including Nature editor Dr. John Maddox and "professional pseudo-science debunker" James Randi, with the cooperation of Benveniste's own team, failed to replicate the results. Subsequent investigations have yielded mixed results. Benveniste's reputation was damaged, but he refused to retract his controversial article. He began to fund his research himself as his external sources of funding were withdrawn, and in 1997 he founded the company DigiBio to further his research:: "The principal mission of DigiBio is to develop and commercialise applications of Digital Biology."
Benveniste died in Paris at the age of 69 after heart surgery. He was twice married and had five children.
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From Wikepedia -
Water memory is a scientifically unsupported speculation that water is capable of retaining a memory of particles once dissolved in it, even after being diluted so much that the chance of even one molecule remaining in the quantity being used is minuscule.[1][2] Shaking the water at each stage of a serial dilution is claimed to be necessary for an effect to occur.[3] The concept was proposed by Jacques Benveniste to explain the alleged therapeutic powers of homeopathic remedies, which are prepared by serially diluting aqueous solutions to such a high degree that even a single molecule of the original solute is highly unlikely to remain in each final preparation. Benveniste sought to prove this as the basic foundation of homeopathy, by conducting an experiment to be published "independently of homeopathic interests" in a major journal.[4] However, while some studies, including Benveniste's, have claimed such an effect, double-blind repetitions of the experiments involved have failed to reproduce the results, and the concept is not accepted by the scientific community.[5]
The most prominent advocate of this idea was the French immunologist Jacques Benveniste.[4] His team, at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), diluted a solution of human antibodies to such a degree that there was no likelihood that a single molecule remained, but said that when human basophils were exposed to the solution, they responded by releasing a chemical substance as they would have if they had encountered the original antibody (part of the allergic reaction). The effect supposedly only worked when the solution was shaken violently. Benveniste claimed "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." [6] At the time, Benveniste offered no explanation of how the effect might work.
Benveniste sent the research to the science journal Nature for publication. There was concern on the part of Nature's editorial oversight board that the material, if published, would lend credibility to homeopathic practitioners even if the effects eventually proved untrue. There was equal concern that the research was simply wrong, given the changes that it would demand of the known laws of physics and chemistry. The editor of Nature, John Maddox, stated that, "Our minds were not so much closed as unready to change our whole view of how science is constructed."[6] But rejecting the paper on any objective grounds was deemed unsupportable; there were no known mistakes within the methodology that were apparent at the time.
In the end, a compromise was reached. The paper was published in Nature Vol. 333 on 30 June 1988,[3] but it was accompanied with an editorial by Maddox that noted "There are good and particular reasons why prudent people should, for the time being, suspend judgment" and described some of the fundamental laws of chemistry and physics which it would violate, if shown to be true.[1] Additionally, Maddox demanded that the experiments be re-run under the supervision of a hand-picked group of what became known as "ghostbusters", including Maddox, famed magician-cum-paranormal researcher James Randi, and Walter Stewart, a physicist and free-lance debunker at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
The team travelled to Benveniste's lab and the experiments were re-run. In the first series the original experimental procedure was carried out as it had been when the paper was first submitted for publication. The experiments were successful, matching the published data quite closely. However, Maddox noted that during the procedure the experimenters were aware of which test tubes originally contained the antibodies and which did not. A second experimental series was started with Maddox and his team in charge of the double-blinding; notebooks were photographed, the lab videotaped, and vials juggled and secretly coded. Randi went so far as to wrap the labels in tinfoil, seal them in an envelope, and then stick them on the ceiling so Benveniste and his colleagues could not read them. Although everyone was confident that the outcome would be the same, reportedly including the Maddox-led team, the effect immediately disappeared.
Nature published a follow-up report in the very next issue[7]: "We conclude that there is no substantial basis for the claim that antiIgE 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." Nevertheless, there was no suggestion of fraud; Maddox and his team initially speculated that someone in the lab "was playing a trick on Benveniste,"[6] but later concluded, "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 for by the French homeopathic company Boiron.
In a response letter published in the same issue of the journal, Benveniste lashed out at Maddox and complained about the "ordeal" he endured at the hands of the Nature team, comparing it to "Salem witchhunts or McCarthy-like prosecutions."[8] In both the Nature response and a following Quirks and Quarks episode, Benveniste especially complained about Stewart, who he stated acted as if they were all frauds and treated them with disdain, complaining about his "typical know-it-all attitude". In his Nature letter, Benveniste also implied that Randi was attempting to hoodwink the experimental run by doing magic tricks, "distracting the technician in charge of its supervision!" He was more apologetic on Quirks and Quarks, re-phrasing his mention of Randi to imply that he had kept the team amused with his tricks and that his presence was generally welcomed. He also pointed out that although it was true two of his team-members were being paid for by a homeopathic company, the same company had paid for Maddox's team's hotel bill.
Maddox was unapologetic, stating "I'm sorry we didn't find something more interesting." On the same Quirks and Quarks show he dismissed Benveniste's complaints, stating that the possibility that the results would be used by the homeopathy community demanded an immediate re-test. In failing, the tests demonstrated that the initial results were likely due to the experimenter effect. He also pointed out that the entire test procedure that Benveniste later complained about was one that had been agreed upon in advance by all parties. It was only when the test then failed that Benveniste claimed it was not appropriate.
The debate continued in the letters section of Nature for several issues, until eventually being ended by the editorial board. It continued in the French press for some time.[9] For all of the arguing over the retests, it has done nothing to stop what Maddox worried about; even in the light of their failure they are still used to claim that the experiments "prove" that homeopathy works.[10] One of Benveniste's co-authors on the Nature paper, Francis Beauvais, later stated that while unblinded experimental trials usually yielded "correct" results (i.e. ultradiluted samples were biologically active, controls were not), "the results of blinded samples were almost always at random and did not fit the expected results: some 'controls' were active and some 'active' samples were without effect on the biological system."[11]
[edit]More recent experiments
Third-party attempts at replication of the Benveniste experiment have produced mixed results. Nature published a paper describing number of follow-up experiments that failed to find a similar effect in 1993[12] and an independent study published in Experientia in 1992 showed no effect.[13] However, an international team led by Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University of Belfast claimed to have succeeded.[14] Randi then forwarded the $1 million challenge to the BBC Horizon program to prove the "water memory" theory following Ennis' experimental procedure. In response, experiments were conducted with the Vice-President of the Royal Society, Professor John Enderby, overseeing the proceedings. The challenge ended with the Horizon team failing to prove the memory of water.[15] For a piece on homeopathy, the ABC program 20/20 also attempted, unsuccessfully, to reproduce Ennis's results.[16]
Benveniste claimed in a 1997 paper that the memory effect could be transmitted over phone lines.[17] This culminated in two additional papers in 1999[18] and another on remote-transmission in 2000.[19] This work has never been accepted by the rest of the scientific community, and an investigation into the subject by the American Department of Defence failed to find any effect.[20]
Research published in 2005 on hydrogen bond network dynamics in water showed that "liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure" within fifty femtoseconds.[21]
References
1 ^ a b Anonymous [John Maddox] (1988). "When to believe the unbelievable". Nature 333 (6176): 787. doi:10.1038/333787a0.
2 ^ See Mole (unit) and Homeopathy for more detailed information on how we can calculate the original number of molecules.
3 ^ a b E. Dayenas; F. Beauvais, J. Amara , M. Oberbaum, B. Robinzon, A. Miadonna, A. Tedeschit, B. Pomeranz, P. Fortner, P. Belon, J. Sainte-Laudy, B. Poitevin and J. Benveniste (30 June 1988). "Human basophil degranulization triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE". Nature 333: 816-818. Retrieved on 2007-06-05.
4 ^ a b Poitevin, Bernard (2005). "Jacques Benveniste: a personal tribute". Homeopathy 94 (2): 138-139. doi:10.1016/j.homp.2005.02.004.
5 ^ P. Ball, Here lies one whose name is writ in water. Nature. 8 August 2007, doi:10.1038/news070806-6. [1]
6 ^ a b c John Langone (8 August 1988). "The Water That Lost Its Memory". Retrieved on 2007-06-05.
7 ^ J. Maddox; J. Randi, W. W. Stewart (28 July 1988). ""High-dilution" experiments a delusion". Nature 334: 287-290. doi:10.1038/334287a0. Retrieved on 2007-06-05.
8 ^ J. Benveniste (28 July 1988). "Dr Jacques Benveniste replies". Nature 334: 291. doi:10.1038/334291a0. Retrieved on 2007-06-05.
9 ^ P. Coles (28 July 1988). "Benveniste controversy rages on in the French press". Nature 334: 372. doi:10.1038/334372a0.
10 ^ Homeopathy breakthrough
11 ^ Memory of water and blinding, Francis Beauvais, Homeopathy, 97(1):41-42, January 2008.
12 ^ Hirst S. J.; Hayes N. A., Burridge J., Pearce FL, Foreman JC. (December 9, 1993). "Human basophil degranulation is not triggered by very dilute antiserum against human IgE". Nature 366 (5): 525-527. doi:10.1038/366525a0. PMID 2455231.
13 ^ Ovelgonne, J. H.; Bol, A. W., Hop, W. C., van Wijk, R (May 15, 1992). "Mechanical agitation of very dilute antiserum against IgE has no effect on basophil staining properties". Experientia 48 (5): 504-508. Birkhäuser Verlag.
14 ^ P. Belon; J. Cumps, M. Ennis, P. F. Mannaioni, J. Sainte-Laudy, M. Roberfroid, F. A. C. Wiegant (April 1999). "Inhibition of human basophil degranulation by successive histamine dilutions: Results of a European multi-centre trial". Inflammation Research 48 (Supplement 1): 17-18. doi:10.1007/s000110050376.
15 ^ Homeopathy: The test. (2003-11-26). Retrieved on 2007-03-04.
16 ^ Stossel, John. "Homeopathic Remedies - Can Water Really Remember?", 20/20, ABC News. Retrieved on 2008-01-22. (English)
17 ^ J. Benveniste; P. Jurgens, W. Hsueh and J. Aissa (February 21-26, 1997). "Transatlantic Transfer of Digitized Antigen Signal by Telephone Link". Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
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