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Jacques Benveniste, dead?

Mojo said:
Is it just me, or is this:

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=570706&host=3&dir=271

being rather charitable (even for an obituary)?
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Well, we've got another take there on how it all started.
In the early 1980s, Benveniste took on a new member of staff - a young medical doctor with a side-interest in homeopathy. "He asked me if he could try out some homeopathic preparations on my allergy test", Benveniste recalled, "and I remember distinctly saying 'OK, but all you will be testing is water'".

....

But when Benveniste's staff member tried a homeopathically diluted allergen on his allergy test, the test showed positive - it produced an allergic response as powerful as the original full-strength allergen. Intrigued but cautious, Benveniste ordered a two-year long series of retests, but the same results kept on recurring. "I was flabbergasted," he said. "My allergy test is highly reliable and yet it was apparently responding to mere water; I felt I was setting foot into an unknown world." Following accepted scientific practice, he then asked five other laboratories to try to replicate his findings. Once again, they obtained the same astonishing results. "Even after more than a billion-fold dilution, water was behaving as if it could remember the molecules it had been originally exposed to," he concluded.
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This one is actually plausible, but it bears no more than a passing resemblance to the story as related on the Horizon programme.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: A technician told me one day I don't understand because I have diluted a substance that is activating basophils to a point where it shouldn't work and it still works.

NARRATOR: The researcher had taken the chemical and added water, just like homeopaths do. The result should have been a solution so dilute it had absolutely no effect and yet, bizarrely, there was a reaction. The basophils had been activated. Benveniste knew this shouldn't have been possible.

JACQUES BENVENISTE: I remember saying to this, to her, this is water so it cannot work.

NARRATOR: Benveniste's team was baffled....
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In one report the key person is "a young medical doctor", referred to by Benveniste as "he", and he's expecting (or at least hoping) to find an effect so is hardly going to be saying "I don't understand it." And in the other report the person is "a technician", referred to be Benveniste as "she", whose motives for doing the experiment are unclear but who is allegedly surprised by the result.

No mention of an unexpected effect relating to the washing of glassware anywhere here.

Now the Telegraph article could be a victim of poor reporting, but it is in fact the more plausible of the two stories. The Horizon report was Benveniste himself talking directly to camera, so surely that (in historian's terms) would be the more reliable? Very peculiar.

And I'd still like to know when Boiron started funding this game.

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
In one report the key person is "a young medical doctor", referred to by Benveniste as "he", and he's expecting (or at least hoping) to find an effect so is hardly going to be saying "I don't understand it." And in the other report the person is "a technician", referred to be Benveniste as "she", whose motives for doing the experiment are unclear but who is allegedly surprised by the result.
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In the Horizon program they mentioned the Nature sponsored re-test of Beveniste's work in which Randi was involved.


IIRC, they mentioned that the positive results tended to disappear when a specific female research assistant was excluded from the evaluation stage of the testing procedure (I think they were manually counting basophils).

I believe this woman was a qualified medical parctitioner and still published papers on homeopathy that find positive results.
 
Drooper said:
IIRC, they mentioned that the positive results tended to disappear when a specific female research assistant was excluded from the evaluation stage of the testing procedure (I think they were manually counting basophils).

I believe this woman was a qualified medical parctitioner and still published papers on homeopathy that find positive results.
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I remember that now. So perhaps the two stories are versions of the same tale, with a female protagonist? I recall that there was someone else at a later stage, an Indian chap I think, whom Benveniste also identified as producing some sort of positive effect. But rather than wonder whether these people might be consciously or unconsciously biassing their observations, he came up with some silly paranormal explanation.

Of course, it's easy to count cells mechanically, with no possible bias, and this is how Madeleine Ennis says she had replicated the result. Don't understand what she's up to really. If the effect is there, it's time it stepped forward and agreed to be identified.

I asked a physicist friend what the cold fusionists were really measuring, and he said it was an unstable and poorly-controlled experimental setup with a lot of room for noise, and they were just measuring experimental artefact. I think the same description probably applies to this lot.

Rolfe.
 
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