Two Nobel prizewinners are being sued for libel by Jacques Benveniste, the controversial French scientist whose research on the “memory of water”, first published in 1988, appeared to provide a scientific basis for homeopathic medicine.
Benveniste refuses to name the individuals he is suing. However, New Scientist has learnt that his targets include Georges Charpak and Francois Jacob. Charpak won the physics Nobel in 1992 for his work on particle detectors at CERN, the European centre for particle physics near Geneva. Jacob, who works at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, received the 1965 prize in medicine for his molecular genetics studies. The third defendant is Claude Hennion, a physicist at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris.
All three researchers made comments presenting Benveniste in an unfavourable light in a series of articles published by the French newspaper Le Monde in January. Benveniste was angered by the articles, and is determined to refute any suggestion that he has been dishonest. “If you say I am a poor scientist, I have no reason to sue,” he says. “If you declare I am a fraud, I am going to sue.”
The lawsuit “doesn’t frighten me”, says Hennion, “but it will make me lose a lot of time”. Charpak and Jacob refused to comment when approached by New Scientist.
In 1988, Benveniste claimed that water retains a “memory” of substances dissolved in it, even after a solution is so diluted that not a single molecule of the substance remains. This concept underlies the practice of homeopathy, in which “activated” water is supposed to cure disease. Benveniste’s research, published in Nature (vol 333, p 816), described immune responses mounted by human cells to repeatedly diluted solutions of allergens.
His work became embroiled in controversy, especially after Nature‘s editor, John Maddox, visited Benveniste’s laboratory with the conjurer and investigator of the paranormal James Randi and Walter Stewart, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health near Washington DC who has investigated several contested experiments. After watching the work repeated, Maddox and his colleagues dismissed Benveniste’s conclusions as a “delusion”. They stated that his claims were “based chiefly on an extensive series of experiments which are statistically ill-controlled.
Benveniste’s immunopharmacology laboratory has since been shut down by INSERM, the French medical research agency. But he has continued his work as the director of the privately funded Digital Biology Laboratory, based on the same campus in Clamart, south of Paris. In his latest experiments, Benveniste claims to have transmitted water “memory” over the Internet via e-mail
By Charles Seife in New Scientist,
27 September 1997
