Benveniste remained convinced that his work would ultimately be recognized with a Nobel Prize, but instead he was merely rewarded with a satirical award known as the Ig Nobel Prize. In fact, he won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1991 and then another one in 1998, making him the first scientist to win two Ig Nobels. As the years passed, Benveniste saw his scientific reputation decline in the press and among his peers, which led him to complain that he was being victimized. He even compared himself to Galileo, because they had both been subjected to attacks when they dared to speak out against the establishment. This was a flawed comparison for two major reasons. First, Galileo was attacked largely by the religious establishment, rather than by his scientific peers. Second, Galileo was in a different class to Benveniste–after all, Galileo’s observations stood up to scrutiny and his experimental results were replicated by others.
Benveniste struggled to retain his academic post as a result of the Nature debacle, but he was determined not to abandon his research, so he established a company called DigiBio to nurture and promote his ideas. Among their wilder pronouncements, researchers at DigiBio stated that not only could water hold a memory of what it had previously contained, but that this memory could also be digitized, transmitted via email and reintroduced into another sample of water, which in turn could affect basophil cells. Although Benveniste died in 2004, DigiBio has continued its campaign to have his ideas taken seriously. Its website proclaims:
From the first high dilution experiments in 1984 to the present, thousands of experiments have been made, enriching and considerably consolidating our initial knowledge. Up to now, we must observe that not a single flaw has been discovered in these experiments and that no valid counter‑experiments have ever been proposed.
In fact, within a year of Benveniste’s original 1988 paper, Nature had published three papers by scientists who failed to reproduce the supposed effect of ultra‑dilute solutions. Even the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) collaborated with homeopaths to test DigiBio’s claim that Benveniste’s effects could be digitized and sent via email, but they came to the following conclusion: ‘Our team found no replicable effects from digital signals.’
On the other hand, there have been occasional papers that claim to replicate the sort of effects observed by Benveniste, but so far none of them has consistently or convincingly presented the sort of evidence that would posthumously vindicate the Frenchman. In 1999, Dr Andrew Vickers looked at 120 research papers related to Benveniste’s work and other types of basic research into the actions of homeopathic remedies. At the time, he was based at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, so he was certainly open‑minded about the potential of homeopathy. Yet Vickers was struck by the failure of independent scientists to replicate any homeopathic effect: ‘In the few instances where a research team has set out to replicate the work of another, either the results were negative or the methodology was questionable.’ Independent replication is a vital part of how science progresses. One single set of experiments can be wrong for a range of reasons, such as lack of rigour, fraud or just bad luck, so independent replication is a way of checking (and re‑checking) that the original discovery is genuine. Benveniste’s research had failed this test.
Indeed, James Randi has continued to offer his $1 million to anyone who can independently reproduce the effects claimed by Benveniste. BBC television took up the challenge as part of its Horizon science documentary series, gathering together a team of scientists to oversee the project. They examined the effect of a homeopathically diluted histamine on cells, and compared this with the effect of pure water. Histamine is associated with allergic responses in cells, but would it still cause cells to react if it had been diluted to the extent that it was no longer present? Professor Martin Bland of St George’s Hospital Medical School announced the final result: ‘There’s absolutely no evidence at all to say that there is any difference between the solution that started off as pure water and the solution that started off with the histamine.’ As anecdotal evidence to reinforce the point, Randi mentioned the following story during the programme: ‘I also consumed sixty‑four times the prescribed dosage of homeopathic sleeping pills and didn’t even feel drowsy. I did this before a meeting of the US Congress–if that doesn’t put you to sleep, nothing will.’
While biologists were trying and failing to find evidence for homeopathy acting at a fundamental cellular level, physicists tried to examine homeopathy at a basic molecular level. It was clear that ultra‑dilute homeopathic solutions contained only water and no molecules of the active ingredient, but some physicists wondered if the water molecules somehow had altered their arrangement in order to retain a memory of the earlier ingredient.
Over the last two decades, physicists have published the results of dozens of experiments examining the molecular structure of normal water versus homeopathically prepared water. They have used powerful and arcane techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Raman spectroscopy and light absorption to look for the slightest evidence that water has a memory of what it once contained. Unfortunately, a review of these studies published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2003 showed that these experiments were generally of poor quality and prone to errors.
For example, one NMR experiment claimed to detect a difference between the molecules in ordinary water and those in a homeopathic remedy, but in the end this was attributed to a problem with the equipment. The NMR apparatus is supplied with test tubes made of soda glass, which is not a very stable form of glass. Hence, when the homeopathic solution was shaken during its preparation, glass molecules were leached into the solution. Not surprisingly, this homeopathic solution responded differently to the pure water in terms of its NMR profile, which initially gave the misleading impression that the homeopathic solution was demonstrating a water‑memory effect. Sure enough, when another research team repeated the experiment with borosilicate glass test tubes, which are much more stable than soda glass, the NMR instrument could no longer detect any difference between water and homeopathic remedies. Yet again, experiments have so far failed to find anything surprising about the behaviour of molecules in homeopathic solutions.
In summary, homeopaths have been disappointed that physicists probing water molecules have found nothing special about homeopathic remedies. Similarly, biologists looking at single cells have not made any great breakthroughs in finding convincing evidence that might support homeopathy.
All of this, however, matters very little in terms of the main homeopathy debate, because what happens at the molecular or cellular level is of much less interest than what happens to patients. Forget biology or physics, because homeopathy is all about medicine. The fundamental question is straightforward: does homeopathy heal patients?
Homeopaths, of course, have always been confident that their remedies cured a range of symptoms, but in order to persuade doctors and everyone else that homeopathy was truly effective, they needed concrete evidence from scientific trials. We have explained in previous chapters that the most conclusive type of clinical trial is the randomized, placebo‑controlled, double‑blind trial; if such trials could generate results that supported Hahnemann’s ideas, then this would force the medical establishment to embrace homeopathy. Alternatively, if these studies failed to show that ultra‑dilute solutions offered any benefit, then this would mean that homeopathy was nothing more than quackery. As the twenty‑first century approached, rigorous trials were about to be conducted on a massive scale. The results would eventually settle the debate over homeopathy once and for all.