21st CENTURY

principle." The empirical reason Bagge
gave for the success of the ellipsoids
in reproducing the magic number series
is the predominant occurrence of
even numbers of nucleons. A deeper
reason, however, might be found by
viewing the process of nucleusformation
from the standpoint of conical
functions and their elliptical integrals.
The history of Bagge's discovery is
itself noteworthy. In 1949, immediately
after getting the idea, he explained
it to Hans Eduard Suess, the Austrian-
American physical chemist, and J. Hans
D. Jensen, the German physicist, who
were passing through on a trip from
Copenhagen. (Jensen made trips to
Copenhagen to visit Niels Bohr.) They
had not previously worked on the
structure of the nucleus, but they took
Bagge's idea and reformulated it in an
algebraic version.* This they sent to
the journal Naturwissenschaften without
any mention of Bagge!
The referee for Naturwissenschaften,
Otto Haxel [a collaborator of Jensen
on this question, either then or
later—ed.], delayed publication of a
prior note by Bagge, so that it did not
appear until the same issue that carried
the article of Jensen and Suess,
thus veiling Bagge's priority.
This is all the more interesting because
Goeppert Mayer and Jensen later
received the Nobel Prize for discovering
the so-called shell structure of
the nucleus.
In another journal, Physical Review,
Samuel A. Goudsmit published Bagge's
idea in an article on electron spin that
again did not mention that the idea
originated with Bagge. It was only after
Bagge's intervention that a note was
printed stating that Bagge had published
"the same idea two years earlier."
It would beworthwhiletotake Vossler's
experimentation further using
nothing more advanced than a microcomputer.
If the major and minor axes
of the ellipsoids are in the golden ratio,
would this not produce the magic
numbers most exactly?
Note-
Versions of Goeppert Mayer's papers appeared
in English in the Physical Review in 1948 and
1949, and a version of Jensen and Suess's paper
appeared in the same journal in 1949.
VIEWPOINT
The Benveniste Affa
Good News
For Science
J.M. Dutuit
VIEWPOINT
r:
At the end of June 1988, a scient fie
matter burst into the world Media
that ordinarily would be seen as
an encouraging event, were he
brains of our age not congealed i nd
atrophied by dogma. In fact, the affair
in question is tending to beco ne
a scandal. It is like a burning or. or
emanating from the back kitchens of
biological research.
If there is a flame smouldering it
is because of theoretical considerations
that are implicit in this wok.
The universally accepted rules of ntellectual
investigation and the a intemporary
view of "matter" ; re
themselves in question. Anyone in
the university establishment whe is
not afraid of ideas—knowing that
they are the very foundation of science—has
no doubt of this. Soine
are sounding the alarm to annour ce
the fire. Many fear that rationality v 'ill
be shipwrecked in the ocean of fa se
science and the tempests of kooke y.
The most radical have declared
their rights and convened comrrissions
of inquiry that Torquemada
would not have disowned—with si >rcerer
and fraud specialist at the ready
with their anathemas! What a pec
iartime we live in.
What I am referring to is, of course,
the Benveniste affair.* Could this ?e
the iceberg that transforms an "Jn-
J.M. Dutuit, PhD and MD, is a paleontologist
working with the Cen
National de la Recherche Scier\ti
fique in the Paris Museum of Natu 'al
History. His viewpoint was translat id
from the French by Claudia Annis
sinkable" ship—our body of physical,
chemical, and biological sciences—into
a scuttled wreck?
On the hypothesis that Jacques
Benveniste may be neither a fraud nor
an incompetent, do the developments
yet to come justify a panic? For
if Benveniste were merely a fraud or
an incompetent, surely there would
be no need for so much commotion.
The principle of the Benveniste
iceberg is simple. Its submerged
mass—that is, the probable explanation
for the phenomenon of degranulation
in the absence of solute
after sufficient dilution—is the entirety
of the phenomena studied by
optical biophysics, as I will explain
below.
Molecular Materialism
Current biomolecular science
holds that in order for information to
be transmitted to a metabolic chain,
it is indispensable for there to be
some "physical" transfer from one
molecule to the other, or an exchange
of a group of atoms, of radicals,
of electrons, with the enzymes
being the transport workers.
Benveniste dissolved in water a
substance that we will call 5. This solution
set off an allergic reaction of
degranulation in vitro upon the basophils
of the blood, a reaction used
frequently to test a great number of
molecules. It is classically accepted
that the mode of action of the allergen
Scan only be molecular. It must
be introduced into the solvent to set
off the reaction of recognition, R.
Let us not forget that we are working
in the context of a Cartesian,
Newtonian physics, where the universe
is made of "solid" individuated
particles. These particles act upon
one another according to linear
chains of causality. In this system,
every electromagnetic phenomenon
is closely bound to a material, individuated
substrate. The presence of
the substance is the condition for action,
the latter being none other than
Continued on page 20
Note
A news analysis of the Benveniste affair appears
on page 16.
21stCENTU !Y November-December 1988