The following rather long excerpt from the book, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe by Lynne McTaggart, goes with the article I am currently working on for Homeopathy Rising.
Since the quote is quite long, I am posting it now for you to read— and then I will be able to link back to it from the full article, while keeping that post from getting excessively long.
So, without further explanation, just check it out!
Some of the sections are a bit technical, but don’t worry too much if you find those parts hard to read— you’ll get the big picture concepts, which are what I am pointing to.
Definitely read to the end!
And I highly recommend you check out the book, The Field, in its entirety.
“This discovery represented a permanent and arduous detour in the career of French scientist Jacques Benveniste, which had, up until the 1980s, followed a distinguished, predictable arc. Benveniste, a doctor of medicine, had put in his residency in the Paris hospital system, and then moved into research into allergies, becoming a specialist in the mechanisms of allergy and inflammation. He’d been appointed research director at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) and distinguished himself by discovering PAF, or platelet activating factor, which is involved in the mechanism of allergies such as asthma.
At 50, Benveniste had the world at his feet. There was no doubt that he would look forward to international acclaim among the establishment. He was proud of being French in a field not necessarily well represented by his countrymen since Descartes. Rumours abounded about the possibility that Benveniste would be one of the few French biologists to be considered as a possible recipient for the Nobel prize. His papers were among those most often cited by scientists at INSERM, a measure of distinction and standing. He’d even received the Silver Medal from CNRS, one of the most prestigious French scientific honors.
[…]
And then, in 1984, this bright and assured future was accidentally derailed by what turned out to be a small error in computation. Benveniste’s laboratory at INSERM had been studying basophil degranulation– the reaction of certain white blood cells to allergens. One day, Elisabeth Davenas, one of his best laboratory technicians, came to him and reported that she’d seen and recorded a reaction in the white blood cells, even though there had been too few molecules of the allergen in the solution. This had all come about as the result of a simple error in calculation. She had thought the starting solution was more concentrated than it was. In diluting it to what she thought was the usual concentration, she had inadvertently diluted the solution to the point where very few of the original antigen molecules remained. After examining the data, Jacques virtually shooed her out of his office. The results you are claiming are impossible, he declared, because there are no molecules here.
‘You have been experimenting with water,’ he told her. ‘Go back and do the work over.’
It was only when she tried to repeat the experiment with the same dilution and came up with the same results that he realized that Elisabeth, a meticulous worker, might have stumbled onto something worth investigating. For several weeks, Elisabeth kept returning to his office with the same inexplicable data, showing powerful biological effects from a solution so weakened that it couldn’t have enough of the antigen to have caused them, and Jacques attempted to come up with ever more far-fetched explanations to fit these results to some recognizable biological theory. Perhaps it was the presence of a second antibody reacting later, or maybe the reaction to an undisclosed second antigen, he thought. After observing these results, one of the tutors in his laboratory, a doctor who was also a homeopath, happened to remark that these experiments were quite similar to the principle of homeopathy.
In that system of medicine, solutions of active substance are diluted to the point where there is virtually none of the original substance left, only its ‘memory’. At the time, Jacques didn’t even know what homeopathy was– that’s how classical a doctor he was– but the research scientist in him had had his appetite sufficiently whetted. He asked Elisabeth to dilute the solutions even more, so that absolutely none of the original active substance remained. In these new studies, no matter how dilute the solution, which was, by now, just plain water, Elisabeth kept getting consistent results, as if the active ingredient were still there.
[A quick insert to remind everyone that the active principle in homeopathy is actually the potentization. Dilution is a side effect, and serves to decrease any toxicity of the substance, but the potentiation is what make the medicines active— and even more so the more highly potentized they are.]
Because of his background as an allergy specialist, Jacques had used a standard allergy test for his studies, the purpose of which was to effect a typical allergic response in human cells. He isolated basophils, a type of white blood cell which contains antibodies of immunoglobulin E (IgE) type on its surface. It is these cells which are responsible for hypersensitivity reactions in people with allergies. Jacques chose IgE cells because they easily respond to allergens such as pollen or dust mites, releasing histamine from their intracellular granules, and also to certain anti-IgE antibodies. If this kind of a cell is affected by something, you’re not likely to miss it. Another advantage of the IgE is that he could test their staining properties through a test he’d developed and patented at INSERM. Because basophils, like most cells, have a jelly-like appearance, when you’re studying them at a lab, you need to stain them in order to see them. But staining, even with a standard dye such as toluidine blue, is subject to change, depending upon many factors– the health of the host, say, and the influence of other cells upon the original. When these IgE cells are exposed to anti-IgE antibodies, it changes their ability to absorb the dye. Anti-IgE has been referred to as a kind of ‘biological paint-stripper’2 because its ability to inhibit the dye is so effective that it can virtually render the basophils invisible again.
The final logic in Benveniste’s choice of anti-IgE had to do with the fact that these particular molecules are especially big. If you are attempting to see if water retained its effect even when all anti-IgE molecules had been filtered out of it, there would be no chance that any of them might be accidentally left behind.
In the studies, conducted over four years between 1985 and 1989, and painstakingly recorded in the laboratory books of Elisabeth Davenas, Benveniste’s team created high dilutions of the anti-IgE by pouring one-tenth of the previous solution into the next tube and filling it up by adding nine parts of a standard solvent. Each dilution was then vigorously shaken (or succussed, as it is technically known), as it is in homeopathic preparations. In total, the team used dilutions like these, of one part solution to nine parts solvent, then kept diluting until there was one part of solution to ninety-nine parts solvent and even one part solution to nine hundred and ninety-nine parts solvent.
Each one of the high dilutions was successively added to the basophils, which were then counted under the microscope. To Jacques’ surprise, as much as anyone’s, they discovered that they were recording effects in inhibiting dye absorption by up to 66 per cent, even with dilutions watered down to one part in 1060. In later experiments, when the dilutions were serially diluted a hundred-fold, eventually to one part in 10120, where there was virtually no possibility that a single molecule of the IgE was left, the basophils were still affected.
The most unexpected phenomenon was yet to come. Although the potency of the anti-IgE was at its highest at concentrations of one part in 1000 (the third decimal dilution) and then started to decrease with each successive dilution, as you might logically expect, the experiment took a U-turn at the ninth dilution. The effect of the highly dilute IgE began increasing at this point and continued to increase, the more it was diluted.3 As homeopathy had always claimed, the weaker the solution, the more powerful its effect.
Benveniste joined forces with five different laboratories in four countries, France, Israel, Italy and Canada, all of whom were able to replicate his results. The thirteen scientists then jointly published the results of their four-year collaboration in a 1988 edition of the highly prestigious Nature magazine, showing that if solutions of antibodies were diluted repeatedly until they no longer contained a single molecule of the antibody, they still produced a response from immune cells.4 The authors concluded that none of the molecules they’d started with were present in certain dilutions and that:
specific information must have been transmitted during the dilution/shaking process. Water could act as a template for the molecule, for example, by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields… The precise nature of this phenomenon remains unexplained.
To the popular press, which pounced on the published paper, Benveniste had discovered ‘the memory of water’, and his studies were widely regarded as making a valid case for homeopathy. Benveniste himself realized that his results had repercussions far beyond any theory of alternative medicine. If water were able to imprint and store information from molecules, this would have an impact on our understanding of molecules and how they ‘talk’ to one another in our bodies, as molecules in human cells, of course, are surrounded by water. In any living cell, there are ten thousand molecules of water for each molecule of protein.
Nature also undoubtedly understood the possible repercussions of this finding on the accepted laws of biochemistry. The editor, John Maddox, had consented to publish the article, but he did so after taking an unprecedented step– placing an editorial addendum at the bottom of the article:
Editorial reservation
Readers of this article may share the incredulity of the many referees who have commented on several versions of it during the past several months. The essence of the result is that an aqueous solution of an antibody retains its ability to evoke a biological response even when diluted to such an extent that there is a negligible chance of their being a single molecule in any sample. There is no physical basis for such an activity. With the kind collaboration of Professor Benveniste, Nature has therefore arranged for independent investigators to observe repetitions of the experiments. A report of this investigation will appear shortly.
In his own editorial, Maddox also invited readers to pick holes in the Benveniste study.5
[Thus began a systematic take-down of Benveniste, employing the same playbook as has been used against many other cutting edge, well-credentialed, doctors who dared to venture out of bounds. Although we have seen it in spades over the past six years, this has been going on for centuries. Please read the book to get the whole story. I will exclude some paragraphs to keep this to the point for us.]
Benveniste was given several chances to gracefully bow out of this work and no professional reason to continue to pursue it. By standing by his original work, he was certain to destroy the career he’d been building. Benveniste had got to the top of his position at INSERM and had no desire to be director. He’d never had ambition for a career, but only wished to carry on with his research. By that time, he also felt he had no choice– the genie was already out of the bottle. He had uncovered evidence that demolished everything he had been taught to believe about cell communication, and there was now no turning back.
This was like, as he enjoyed putting it, peering under the skirt of nature. Benveniste left INSERM, and sought support from private sources such as DigiBio, which enabled him and Didier Guillonnet, a gifted engineer from École Centrale Paris, who joined him in 1997, to carry on their work. After the Nature fiasco, they moved on to ‘digital biology’, a discovery they made not in a single moment of inspiration, but after eight years of following a logical trail of cautious experimentation.9
The memory of water studies had prompted Benveniste to examine the manner in which molecules communicate within a living cell. In all aspects of life, molecules must speak to each other. If you are excited, your adrenals pump out more adrenaline, which must tell specific receptors to get your heart to beat faster. The usual theory, called the Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR), is that two molecules that match each other structurally exchange specific (chemical) information, which occurs when they bump into each other. It’s rather like a key finding its own keyhole (which is why this theory is often also called the key–keyhole, or lock-and-key interaction model). Biologists still adhere to the mechanistic notions of Descartes that there can only be reaction through contact, some sort of impulsive force. Although they accept gravity, they reject any other notions of action at a distance.
If these occurrences are due to chance, there’s very little statistical hope of their happening, considering the universe of the cell. In the average cell, which contains one molecule of protein for every ten thousand molecules of water, molecules jostle around the cell like a handful of tennis balls floating about in a swimming pool. The central problem with the current theory is that it is too dependent upon chance and also requires a good deal of time. It can’t begin to account for the speed of biological processes, like anger, joy, sadness or fear. But if instead each molecule has its own signature frequency, its receptor or molecule with the matching spectrum of features would tune into this frequency, much as your radio tunes into a specific station, even over vast distances, or one tuning fork causes another tuning fork to oscillate at the same frequency. They get in resonance– the vibration of one body is reinforced by the vibration of another body at or near its frequency. As these two molecules resonate on the same wavelength, they would then begin to resonate with the next molecules in the biochemical reaction, thus creating, in Benveniste’s words, a ‘cascade’ of electromagnetic impulses travelling at the speed of light. This, rather than accidental collision, would better explain how you initiate a virtually instantaneous chain reaction in biochemistry. It also is a logical extension of the work of Fritz Popp. If photons in the body excite molecules along the entire spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies, it is logical that they would have their own signature frequency.
Benveniste’s experiments decisively demonstrated that cells don’t rely on the happenstance of collision but on electromagnetic signalling at low frequency (less than 20 kHz) electromagnetic waves. The electromagnetic frequencies that Benveniste has studied correspond with frequencies in the audio range, even though they don’t emit any actual noise that we can detect. All sounds on our planet–the sound of water rippling in a stream, a crack of thunder, a shot fired, a bird chirping–occur at low frequency, between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, the range in which the human ear can hear.
According to Benveniste’s theory, two molecules are then tuned into each other, even at long distance, and resonate to the same frequency. These two resonating molecules would then create another frequency, which would then resonate with the next molecule or group of molecules, in the next stage of the biological reaction. This would explain, in Benveniste’s view, why tiny changes in a molecule– the switching of a peptide, for example– would have a radical effect on what that molecule actually does.
This is not so farfetched, considering what we already know about how molecules vibrate. Both specific molecules and intermolecular bonds emit certain specific frequencies which can be detected billions of light-years away, through the most sensitive of modern telescopes. These frequencies have long been accepted by physicists, but no one in the biological community save Fritz-Albert Popp and his predecessors has paused to consider whether they actually have some purpose. Others before Benveniste, such as Robert O. Becker and Cyril Smith, had conducted extensive experimentation on electromagnetic frequencies in living things. Benveniste’s contribution was to show that molecules and atoms had their own unique frequencies by using modern technology both to record this frequency and to use the recording itself for cellular communication.
From 1991, Benveniste demonstrated that you could transfer specific molecular signals simply by using an amplifier and electromagnetic coils. Four years later, he was able to record and replay these signals using a multimedia computer. Over thousands of experiments, Benveniste and Guillonnet recorded the activity of the molecule on a computer and replayed it to a biological system ordinarily sensitive to that substance. In every instance, the biological system has been fooled into thinking it has been interacting with the substance itself and acted accordingly, initiating the biological chain reaction, just as it would if in the actual presence of the genuine molecule.10 Other studies have also shown that Benveniste’s team could erase these signals and stop activity in the cells through an alternating magnetic field, work they performed in collaboration with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Medudon, France. The inescapable conclusion: as Fritz-Albert Popp theorized, molecules speak to each other in oscillating frequencies. It appeared that the Zero Point Field creates a medium enabling the molecules to speak to each other nonlocally and virtually instantaneously.
The DigiBio team tested out digital biology on five types of studies: basophilic activation; neutrophilic activation; skin testing; oxygen activity; and, most recently, plasma coagulation. Like whole blood, plasma, the yellowy liquid of the blood, which carries protein and waste products, will coagulate. To control for that ability, you must first remove the calcium in the plasma, by chelating–chemically grabbing–it. If you then add water with calcium to the blood, it will coagulate, or clot. Adding heparin, a classic anti-coagulant drug, will prevent the blood from clotting, even in the presence of the calcium.
In Benveniste’s most recent study, he took a test-tube of this plasma with calcium chelated out, then added water containing calcium which has been exposed to the ‘sound’ of heparin transmitted via the signature digitized electromagnetic frequency. As with all his other experiments, the signature frequency of heparin works as though the molecules of heparin itself were there: in its presence, the blood is more reluctant than usual to coagulate.
In perhaps the most dramatic of his experiments, Benveniste showed that the signal could be sent across the world by email or mailed on a floppy disk. Colleagues of his at Northwestern University in Chicago recorded signals from ovalbumin (Ova), acetylcholine (Ach), dextran and water. The signals from the molecules were recorded on a purpose-designed transducer and a computer equipped with a sound card. The signal was then recorded on a floppy disk and sent by regular mail to the DigiBio Laboratory in Clamart. In later experiments, the signals were also sent by email as attached documents. The Clamart team then exposed ordinary water to the signals of this digital Ova or Ach or ordinary water and infused either the exposed water or the ordinary water to isolated guinea pig hearts. All the digitised water produced highly significant changes in coronary flow, compared with the controls–which just contained ordinary, non-exposed water. The effects from the digitized water were identical to effects produced on the heart by the actual substances themselves.11”
[The story continues on, and I highly recommend the book overall for a scientific journalist’s deep dive into many fascinating subjects. The section above is only one very small portion of the book, but an important piece to consider in the context of this month’s article.]
- by Lynne McTaggart, from The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
All bold emphasis and bold notes in brackets are mine.
Here’s the full article that followed.
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3
This is just up my alley. I can’t wait to read the follow up
Fascinating!