Nobel scientist discovers scientific basis of homeopathy

[DesertFlower]

In the week that doctors have described homeopathy as ‘nonsense on stilts’, a Nobel prize-winning scientist has made a discovery about the nature of water that suggests the therapy does have a scientific basis. Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who won the Nobel prize for discovering a link between HIV and AIDS, has shocked fellow Nobel prize-winners by telling them that water has a memory that continues even after many dilutions. The idea is one of the foundations of homeopathy, which maintains that the potency of a substance is increased with its dilution. Montagnier has discovered that solutions containing the DNA of viruses and bacteria “could emit low frequency radio waves”. These waves influence molecules around them, and turn them into organised structures. These molecules in turn can emit waves. He has discovered that the waves remain in the water, even after it has been diluted many times. Montagnier’s statement couldn’t happen at a worse time for doctors. Last week, the UK’s British Medical Association (BMA) – the trade union of doctors – passed a resolution to stop homeopathy being made available on the National Health Service. It also wants all homeopathic remedies to be placed in a special area marked ‘Placebos’ in health shops and pharmacies. The NHS currently spends around £4m a year on homeopathy, mainly by funding four homeopathic hospitals in the UK. (Sources: Sunday Times, July 4, 2010; British Medical Association).

http://www.wddty.com/nobel-scientist-discovers-scientific-basis-of-homeopathy.html

[Warpy]

1. Uh, it's still just WATER

whether or not the chains of molecules are arranged differently.

[izquierdista]

3. Water....never drink the stuff

Fish shit in it. -- W.C. Fields

[Warpy]

5. Yeah, talk about "memory water,"

how do homeopaths deal with all the memory of feces and urine stretching back before the dinosaurs?

Icky doodle.

[laconicsax]

17. Magic. n/t

[Deep13]

2. Let's see how it goes in clinical testing.

:eyes:

[BootinUp]

10. lol. Hey, do you know what they call alternative medicine

that has been proved to work?
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medicine.

[jody]

4. Then diluted urine has magical properties! Recall reading one recipe for making black powder that

recommended using urine from young virgin girls as the best source of potassium nitrate.

[thereismore]

6. Water emitting radiowaves... has to stop emitting them. Conservation of energy.

This guy has lost it.

[Hydra]

7. Amazing what we don't know about reality

But then, "reality" feels less solid to me with every fact I learn.

[slutticus]

8. Wow!

That's quite a leap to go from " some bacterial DNA sequences induce electromagnetic waves at high aqueous dilutions" to "Nobel scientist discovers scientific basis of homeopathy".


Um no. High aqueous dilution does not imply that the DNA is gone, or that there is some kind of "memory" at work here. The DNA is still there, and can resonate when exposed to ambient electromagnetic fields (which is a really cool phenomenon actually....).

They were unable to detect any signals beyond a certain dilution....so no......."water memory" is not involved here.

[bemildred]

9. Not just babble, but bizarre babble.

One wonders what it is that water remembers after many dilutions? One wonders what the water is diluted with? More water perhaps? But then it's not really the water that is being diluted, water is what the whatever-it-is is being diluted with, the dilution agent. So the old water from the concentrated solution is still there remembering I guess, but it's just a small part of the water in the diluted solution, just like there is very little of the solute left in the diluted solution. And I would guess that all the new added water doesn't remember anything, unless the old water somehow transmits it to the new water, so the new water can remember it too.

All matter can emit radio waves, or other electromagnetic waves, which can influence atoms and molecures and stuff, which do in fact have organized structures.

I do sort of wonder how the waves remain in the water though, they are supposed to be flashing off at the speed of light. Is there some sort of little closed race track in the water that the waves race around?

[roguevalley]

20. today's babble is tomorrow's accepted practice. my grandpa never

did believe planes could fly but they did. of course, he was born in 1885. :)

[bemildred]

21. Irrational fads come and go, it's true. And conventional medicine has it's share of those.

Scientists are just as likely to get emotionally involved in their theories and anyone else, and also just as likely to deny it.

But the OP is still incoherent babble.

[laconicsax]

22. Homeopathy has been "today's babble" since the 18th century.

200 years later and the closest thing to proof it has is a study that contradicts some of homeopathy's core principles.

Really. The Montagnier's study contradicts two of the most basic homeopathic principles--that water 'remembers' a substance indefinitely, and that serial dilution strengthens the dose.

In the study, the effect being billed as water's 'memory' only lasted for a couple days under ideal conditions, and serial dilutions didn't strengthen the observed effect.

Here's a dramatization of what homeopathy as an accepted practice would look like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

[jimlup]

11. Sorry but it still sounds pretty dopey

[laconicsax]

12. This is based on an old and sketchy study.

It's also addressed and pretty well debunked http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2081">here.

While not necessarily impacting the validity of the study, its publishing details raise some concerns. It was not published in an established, respected journal. It appeared in the first volume, second issue of a new journal, Interdisciplinary Sciences–Computational Life Sciences. The article is not written in the usual scientific format – it lacks separate sections for Methods, Results, etc. There are numerous typos and language errors that should have been caught by any proofreader even if the peer reviewers missed them. The editor in chief is in Shanghai, and four of the other editors are in various Chinese cities, while the other two are US based but have Chinese names. Montagnier is on the editorial board. It says it is peer-reviewed, but the speed of the process is worrisome: the Montagnier article was received 3 January 2009, revised 5 January 2009 and accepted 6 January 2009.

...

Anyway, in vitro findings by themselves can’t ever validate homeopathy, even if they could demonstrate that water can remember what molecules were diluted out of it. They would still have to show that such memory translated to specific therapeutic effects on human physiology. Homeopathy is a system of clinical treatment that can only be validated by in vivo clinical trials. Homeopaths who believe Montagnier’s study supports homeopathy are only demonstrating their enormous capacity for self-deception.

Water doesn't have a memory--it's a fluid, meaning it is always moving. Always moving means that any structures formed don't last for even a full second.

I wasn't aware that homeopathic principles included water emitting radio waves. I also wasn't aware that homeopathy relies on the presence of DNA in the original solution, nor was I aware that it allows for dilutions not strengthening the effect.

What does bacterial and viral DNA interacting with water have to do with serial dilution of inanimate matter? Do aqueous solutions of arsenic spontaneously form DNA that then starts emitting low frequency radio waves when shaken, allowing for serial dilutions to retain the 'memory' of the arsenic? If the whole thing relies on at least a trace amount of the original DNA remaining, doesn't that discredit the idea of serial dilutions strengthening the dose even after there are no remaining particles? I thought the whole "water memory" concept was an explanation of how homeopathic dilutions work despite not containing any of the original material.

Which is it? Either water has a memory that allows the remedy to work after all of the original material has been diluted out or small amounts of the original material are needed in the final solution. You can't have it both ways.

Come on homeopaths, get your stories straight.

[struggle4progress]

13. Electromagnetic signals are produced by aqueous nanostructures derived from bacterial DNA sequences

Luc Montagnier 1, 2
Jamal Aïssa 1
Stéphane Ferris 1
Jean-Luc Montagnier 1
and Claude Lavalléee 1

(1) Nanectis Biotechnologies, S.A. 98 rue Albert Calmette, F78350 Jouy en Josas, France
(2) Vironix LLC, L. Montagnier 40 Central Park South, New York, NY 10019, USA
Received: 3 January 2009 Revised: 5 January 2009 Accepted: 6 January 2009 Published online: 4 March 2009

Abstract A novel property of DNA is described: the capacity of some bacterial DNA sequences to induce electromagnetic waves at high aqueous dilutions. It appears to be a resonance phenomenon triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency waves. The genomic DNA of most pathogenic bacteria contains sequences which are able to generate such signals. This opens the way to the development of highly sensitive detection system for chronic bacterial infections in human and animal diseases.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/0557v31188m3766x/

It is entirely unclear to me what this research actually means. It would seem to me highly unexpected that ambient EMF could induce measureable resonance signal from ultradilute solutions of DNA and that the signal could be diagnostic for the DNA. The WDDTY link in the OP seems even less plausible

[laconicsax]

14. It means absolutely nothing as far as "proving" homeopathy is concerned.

It not only doesn't demonstrate a mechanism by which homeopathy is supposed to word, but contradicts the principles it's supposed to prove.

For example, it "proves" that water has a memory even if none of the original substance remains by showing that at least a small amount of the original DNA is necessary for the nanostructures to form.

It also "proves" that serial dilution strengthens the solution's potency by failing to show results consistent with that hypothesis, all while "proving" that homeopathic remedies have an unlimited shelf life because wates never forgets by showing that the radio waves never lasted more than a couple days.

It's really a homeopathic proof--the less evidence, the stronger the case.

[struggle4progress]

15. I think you and I are in rather fair agreement on this. From a scientific

point of view, of course, one does not completely dismiss a reported result without first reading the paper, which I have not done

But it is difficult for me to imagine how induced "resonances" from a very dilute DNA solution could possibly be strong enough to detect or characteristic enough to classify the biological origin of the DNA

I do not know the origin of the claim "water remembers" -- it is, of course true that (at short time scales) water has a quasicrystalline molecular cage structure due to hydrogen bonding, but in the free bulk liquid I would expect your earlier comment (indicating such local structure cannot last long) was correct

The chance, that some persistent "memory" by water of earlier solutes could play any medicinal role, seems unlikely in the extreme, since if one swallows water it is subjected to the stomach acid environment (which provides H+, expected to affect the hydrogen bonding structure) and diffuses through gut cell membranes (also expected to disrupt any structure)

One could go on in this fashion, examining the chain of ever-widening claims in more and more detail, but that seems entirely pointless to me, since there is the one strange paper, apparently followed by increasingly crankish interpretation of it

I won't waste time on this

[Odin2005]

16. No.

[laconicsax]

18. Come on...why don't yiu tell us how you really feel.

:P

[Odin2005]

19. No!

:P

[HuckleB]

23. Hogwash.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/07/paragon-of-science-or-crackpot-life-after-winning-a-nobel.ars

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=2081

[SidDithers]

24. Montagnier has gone kookoo...nt

Sid

[HuckleB]

25. Yup.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BBbVdiqK20