Memory of water

Template:TOC-right Memory of water is a phrase originated by journalists from Le Monde, a prestigious French newspaper, to designate the implications of the controversial research of Jacques Benveniste and his colleagues on homeopathy; the French phrase is mémoire de l'eau. Benveniste et al. reported that particular solutions of biologically active compounds subjected to sequential physical processing and progressive dilutions appeared to have some biological effects that were different from the "control" effects of the water used as a solvent, even though the solution was diluted so much that the chance that a single molecule of the biologically active solute was left in it was completely negligible. Benveniste et al. hypothesized that water somehow "remembers" the active compounds (together with their biological properties) that it contained before dilution. The work resulted in considerable controversy, as most other laboratories stated they were unable to reproduce the reported effects, while, on the other hand, an international collaboration led by Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University of Belfast reported confirmation. Following Benveniste and coworkers, Ennis et al. studied the effects of homeopathically treated solutions on human basophils. An overview of the issues surrounding the memory of water and its relationship to homeopathic medicine was the subject of a special issue of the leading journal on homeopathy.

The consensus of mainstream science is that liquid water exists as a continuously rearranging hydrogen-bonded network with motions on the picosecond (10⁻¹² s) scale.. A picture of a quickly rearranging network is very difficult to reconcile with liquid water structures that are sustained for more than a few picoseconds. Accordingly there is no room for a water "memory" in the modern scientific view on the liquid. If work other than effects on human basophils would become available that would support the notion of water memory, and if this work would stand scientific scrutiny, then much of the existing experimental and theoretical data on liquid water would have to be reinterpreted or even rejected. Before this happens, most water researchers do not find it useful to speculate in what way liquid water could store long-lived information.

The components of liquid water

Water is not simply a collection of molecules of H₂O, it contains several molecular species including ortho and para water molecules, and water molecules with different isotopic compositions such as HDO and H₂¹⁸O. These water molecules as part of weakly-bound but partially-covalently linked molecular clusters containing one, two, three or four hydrogen bonds, and hydrogen ion and hydroxide ion species. In addition, there are always adventitious solutes in liquid water. Even double-distilled and deionized water always contains significant and variable trace amounts of contaminating ions, and different samples will differ in the contaminants that they contain.

Putative explanations

There is some support for the notion that water can have properties that depend on how it has previously been processed (that is, water has, in some sense, a kind of "memory"). In particular, water, as a result of repeated vigorous shaking, might include Redox molecules produced from water, dissolved atmospheric gases and airborne contaminants, silicates (i.e., tiny glass "chips"), nanobubbles and their material surfaces, dissolved ions, including from the glassware. It may also be contaminated by material that adheres to the surfaces of glassware, for example by bacterial material. There might also be some effects of successive shaking on water structure that causes "clustering" of water molecules.

These mechanisms are not mechanisms of memory in any cognitive or electronic computing sense; the term memory here is used as a metaphor, implying only that the past history has a discernible influence on the present properties.

The Benveniste studies

Human basophils are a rare granulocyte cell type accounting for 0.1–1% of white blood cells; these cells contain large numbers of "granules" which store inflammatory mediators, including in particular histamine. These cells can be cultured readily and studied in vitro. In these cells, exposure to anti-human-IgE antibodies triggers a "degranulation" process in which the granules fuse with the plasma membrane to release their contents, including histamine, into the extracellular fluid. At high concentrations (>10⁻⁶ M) histamine binds to H2 receptors on the surface of the basophils, and regulates the basophil degranulation by feedback inhibition.

Basophil activation can be measured in several different ways. First, degranulated cells can be stained and then counted; this is a subjective measurement and is prone to variable outcomes depending on the observer. Second, histamine release into the culture medium can be measured using fluorimetric assays. Third, the fusion of cytoplasmatic granules leads to the expression of the marker CD63 on the surface of the basophils; the percentage of basophils that express CD63 can be determined with flow-cytometry, and correlates well with histamine release.

In 1988, Jacques Benveniste (1935-2004) a distinguished French immunologist published a controversial paper in Nature reporting on the action of very high dilutions of anti-immunoglobulin E on the degranulation of human basophils. At the high dilutions used, the solutions should have contained only molecules of water, and no molecules of (anti-IgE) at all. Benveniste concluded that the configuration of molecules in water was biologically active, and a journalist coined the term water memory.

Nature published the article with two unprecedented conditions: first, that the results must first be confirmed by other laboratories; second, that a team selected by Nature be allowed to investigate his laboratory following publication. Benveniste accepted these conditions; the results were replicated in Milan, Italy; in Toronto, Canada; in Tel-Aviv, Israel and in Marseille, France, and the article was accompanied by an editorial titled "When to believe the unbelievable." After publication, the follow-up investigation was conducted by a team including the editor of Nature, Dr John Maddox, American scientific fraud investigator and chemist Walter Stewart, and "professional pseudoscience debunker" James Randi. With the cooperation of Benveniste's team, under double-blind conditions, they failed to replicate the results. Benveniste refused to withdraw his claims, and the team published in the July 1988 a detailed critique of Benveniste’s study. They claimed that the experiments were badly controlled statistically, that measurements that conflicted with the claim had been excluded, that there was insufficient"avoidance of contamination, and that there were questions of undisclosed conflict of interest, as the salaries of two coauthors of the published article were paid for under a contract with the French company Boiron et Cie.

In the same issue of Nature (and subsequently) Benveniste vigorously attacked the Nature team’s "mockery of scientific inquiry." Subsequent attempts by other labs to reproduce Beneviste's results have failed to reproduce the effects . However other studies have looked at the effects of very low concentrations of histamine on degranulation induced by anti-immunoglobulin E (IgE) antibodies, and again reported effects at very low concentrations .. As degranulation itself produces relatively high concentrations of histamine in the medium, one would only expect an effect with very high concentrations of added histamine - and indeed the most recent study reported significant effects only at 10-2M histamine. These experiments generally involved dilutions of histamine to concentrations of as low as 10-38M, and the dilutions were performed conventionally not according to the protocols used in homeopathy.

So how is it possible that adding vanishingly low concentrations of histamine to a preparation that is already secreting high concentrations might have any effect? What could possibly explain the extraordinary results reported by Beneviste and others? One difficulty with the basophil preparation is that, in these cells, degranulation can be triggered by many different stimuli, including slight mechanical disturbances and environmental variations in temperature, and is sensitive to small differences in incubation time, making adequate controls very difficult. For example, in the experiments of Giggisber et al, the authors found no significant effects of low dilutions of histamine, but did find significant effects for row numbers of the microtiter plates - i.e. there was a significant effect simply of the order in which the samples were assayed.They concluded that seemingly, trivial differences in the experimental set up can lead to significant differences of the results.

Benveniste never retracted his claims. On the contrary, in 1997, he declared that the memory could be transmitted across a digital telephone link, suggesting that the memory involved electromagnetic signals .

Water in living organisms

Water is essential for living organisms at every level; at the molecular level in living cells, it is essential for functional macromolecular folding, stabilization and activity, transport, membrane formation and protein insertion into membranes; it the intracellular matrix in which biological molecules interact. Understanding exactly how water diffuses when confined in proximity to complex macromolecules inside a cell is therefore an important challenge. The diffusion coefficient of water in biological tissues has been measured using nuclear magnetic resonance, and these have shown that, within a cell, water diffuses much more slowly than pure water in aqueous media. This is partly explained by tortuosity effects, macromolecular crowding and confinement effects, but some (but not all) have suggested that the interaction with macromolecules might cause "clustering" of water molecules -that it might change the structure of the intracellular water.

The cell can be seen, from a somewhat extreme structuralist point of view, as organized water. There is an incipient order in liquid water, which is given long-range coherence and permanence by the protein framework. In the words of A. Szent-Gyorgyi, “Life is water dancing to the tune of solids”.

Water structure as a basis for homeopathy

"Based on this evidence we would be ready to accept that homoeopathy can be efficacious, if only the mechanism of action were more plausible". Kleijnen J et al.(1991). Clinical trials of homeopathy. British Medical Journal 302:316–23.

Homeopathy involves the use of 'remedies' that typically involve "ultradilution" of drugs; dilution well beyond the point at which any of the original molecules are still present, combined with vigorous shaking at each stage of dilution. Samuel Hahnemann, the 18th century founder of homeopathy, recognised that the vehicle or solvent (water or alcohol) must be considered as the medicine, rather than the molecule Research on the plausibility of homeopathy is thus an attempt to characterize how the behaviour of the molecules of a solvent might differ depending, on the solute that was diluted in it and on the kinetic energy imposed on it (by "shaking"). Liquid water is generally assumed to be a network of H₂O molecules forming short-lived (on the order of 10⁻¹² s) hydrogen bonds. Some scientists have questioned whether the very short life of these bonds determines an equally short life to the structures found in water, at the larger scale of 200 or more H₂O molecules. At an even larger scale, it can be easily observed that a wave keeps existing despite of the constant doing and undoing of hydrogen bonds, and that ice sculptures are also made of H₂O molecules constantly bonding and separating. In the same way, water clusters of a hundred or more molecules might have a longer life than the individual bonds composing it.

Many 'anomalies' of water reflect a heterogeneity in its structure: liquid water is a combination of different phases (a term in materials science to designate 3D arrangements of molecules or patterns) that are not short-lived, although, at the smaller, molecular scale, the incessant agitation might evoke the impression that no higher order can exist.

Two physicochemical phenomena have been given particular attention by proponents of homeopathy: clathrates and solitons. Clathrates are complexes of water molecules around low-molecular-weight molecules (e.g., methane) or atoms (e.g., xenon) that can cause the growth of other clathrates devoid of central molecules. The presence of clathrates affects the results of mass spectrometry. Thus this is a mechanism whereby low concentration contaminants can influence the apparent properties of water..

Vigorous shaking of water in glass bottles can cause small amounts of silica (silicate) fragments to fall into it and saturation of water with components of air. Homeopathic drug manufacturers use a double-distilled water in making their medicine, and whatever medicinal substance is placed in the water might interact with the silicate fragments.

It has been suggested that micro-bubbles and nano-bubbles, caused by vigorous shaking, might "burst" to produce microenvironments of higher temperature and pressure. Some scientists have estimated that the vigorous shaking involved with making homeopathic remedies changes the pressure in the water, akin to water being at 10,000 feet in altitude.