21st CENTURY

sonable tolerance for Baltimore's
questionable results is in sharp contrast
to Maddox's personally supervised
hatchet job on Benveniste.
Benveniste's heresy is not the more
obvious case of "forbidden ideas" but
the more profound one of having witnessed,
and reported, "forbidden
events." It is these forbidden events
that mock politically powerful, but
epistemologically flawed, scientific
paradigms, since there is no way to
compass the events within the paradigm.
Inthisparticularcase, if thefindings
do not represent an artifact or experimental
quirk—and they well may
not—then the explanation must be
sought elsewhere than on the molecular
level.
Structured Water
The closest point of comparison
would be to the spin coherence of nuclei
in the "structured water" found in
living tissue. By comparing the varying
time of relaxation of tissue in different
conditions, through the use of nuclear
magnetic resonance (NMR) technology,
diagnosis of tumors and other
pathogenic conditions is made possible.
Such "structuring" of water, which
involves a collective molecular effect,
does not, however, involve shaking as
a precondition. Benveniste's results
would involve the transmission of subatomic
rather than molecular magnetic
resonances in an ordered manner
throughout the solution, and the persistence
of this resonance in the absence
of the original molecule that induced
it.
Such transmission of organization i n
the absence of molecules has been
documented in studies of mitogenic
radiation by the Russian scientist Alexander
Gurwitsch and his student V.P.
Kaznocheev. In the Kaznocheev experiment,
uninfected cell cultures
separated from virus-infected cell cultures
showed degenerative changes
when the glass barrier between the
cultures permitted the passage of ultraviolet
light, despite the fact that no
virus was present and no molecular exchange
could take place.
Benveniste's results present the
possibility that new and fruitful openings
may be found out of the present
dead end of molecular biology. These
openings will be explored and developed
by optical biophysics, which is
uniquely capable of examining the living
process as a process, as opposed
to the molecular-biological approach,
which is analogous to smashing a watch
into pieces and then trying to figure
out how it works by looking at the individual
pieces.
The real Achilles heel of current biological
science is that the statistical information
theory model, based on the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, by
its nature is incapable of dealing with
singular events, such as life, which, as
Jacques Monod states, it necessarily
regards as highly improbable.
It is useful to remember that when
the 19th century physicist Bernhard
Riemann predicted the existence of
acoustical shock waves, many years
before their empirical demonstration,
a number of eminent physicists of the
politically dominant Newtonian-Maxwellian
school proved, according to
their mathematics, that such shock
waves were "impossible." That they
were later proved wrong did not alter
their view; it simply motivated them to
suppress and distort Riemann's work.
More recently, these same arbiters
of "acceptable" science have attempted
to coverthe inability of theirflawed
mathematics to explain certain subatomic
phenomena with a shower of
quarks.
The great physiologist Claude Bernard,
a colleague of Louis Pasteur, once
described a scientist as a man asking
questions of nature. There are no unsuccessful
experiments, he said, because
whatever the answer, knowledge
is obtained that forms the basis
for further questions. Nature editor
Maddox apparently believes that nature
gave a wrong answer and that it is
the job of Nature to correct nature, or
at least punish the asker of the bad
question.
The gods of orthodoxy can always
eliminate ideas by assassinating, physically
or otherwise, those who espouse
them. But natural phenomena
are a consequence of that underlying
lawfulness of the universe that proceeds
with—to use an appropriately
French term—"la belle indifference"
to the wishes of the self-styled gods of
Olympus who think they run "the system,"
or to the wishes of their functionaries,
like Mssrs. Maddox, Stewart,
and Randi.
Viewpoint
Continued from page 7
an effect upon other substances.
This materialism—with its capability
of endowing each part of the universe
with individual existence as an
object—protects the objectivity of the
latter, and that of our consciousness
as well. But the price we pay for such
materialism is the uncertain character
of the universe; in this scheme, scientific
prediction can do nothing but
announce the global future of molecular
units in accordance with Boltzmann's
laws of probability applied to
thermodynamics. In practice, this
means the increasing entropy of the
physical universe with life giving way
to entropy, for it is then nothing but a
graft, living at the expense of the physical
universe. (This is the view of llya
Prigogine, for example.)
Benveniste and the scientists who
verified his experiments repeatedly increased
by a factor of 10 the proportion
of waterto solute. They continued
to test the allergenic power of S by the
same biological technique. Even when
very high dilutions were reached,
where the chance that the solution
contained even a single molecule of
the substance S became infinitesimal,
the "solution" still setoff the reaction
R. This therefore proved that the action
is not dependent on the appreciable
presence of S, but rather on the
"imprint" that S left on the solvent.
Benveniste therefore posed the hypothesis
that certain electromagnetic
events took place while S was in the
solution, modifying the behavior of this
water in a lasting way that was specific
to S. Thus, certain information was
being transmitted throughout the procedure
of dilution inamannerthatwas
purely active and not material. One can
imagine the door—or rather the immense
gates—that open suddenly,
and, as most will think, onto the unknown.
Those who know even the general
findings of optical biophysics, however,
will be less astonished and less
scandalized.
Benefits of the Benveniste Affair
My purpose here is to review succinctly
the general findings and the
useful consequences that can be expected
from this Benveniste affair, as
20 November-December 1988 21st CENTURY BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE