The Field (13 page)

Nature
’s results had a devastating effect upon Benveniste’s reputation and his position at INSERM. A scientific council of INSERM censured his work, claiming in near unanimous statements that he should have performed other experiments ‘before asserting that certain phenomena have escaped two hundred years of chemical research.’
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INSERM refused to listen to Benveniste’s objections about the quality of the
Nature
investigation and prevented him from continuing. Rumours circulated about mental imbalance and fraud. Letters poured in to
Nature
and other publications, calling his work ‘dubious science’, a ‘cruel hoax’ and ‘pseudo-science’.
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Benveniste was given several chances to gracefully bow out of this work and no professional reason to continue to pursue it. By standing by his original work, he was certain to destroy the career he’d been building. Benveniste had got to the top of his position at INSERM and had no desire to be director. He’d never had ambition for a career, but only wished to carry on with his research. By that time, he also felt he had no choice – the genie was already out of the bottle. He had uncovered evidence that demolished everything he had been taught to believe about cell communication, and there was now no turning back. But also there was the undeniable thrill of it. Here was the most compelling research he could think of, the most explosive of results he could imagine. This was like, as he enjoyed putting it, peering under the skirt of nature. Benveniste left INSERM, and sought support from private sources such as DigiBio, which enabled him and Didier Guillonnet, a gifted engineer from École Centrale Paris, who joined him in 1997, to carry on their work. After the
Nature
fiasco, they moved on to ‘digital biology’, a discovery they made not in a single moment of inspiration, but after eight years of following a logical trail of cautious experimentation.
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The memory of water studies had prompted Benveniste to examine the manner in which molecules communicate within a living cell. In all aspects of life, molecules must speak to each other. If you are excited, your adrenals pump out more adrenaline, which must tell specific receptors to get your heart to beat faster. The usual theory, called the Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR), is that two molecules that match each other structurally exchange specific (chemical) information, which occurs when they bump into each other. It’s rather like a key finding its own keyhole (which is why this theory is often also called the key – keyhole, or lock-and-key interaction model). Biologists still adhere to the mechanistic notions of Descartes that there can only be reaction through contact, some sort of impulsive force. Although they accept gravity, they reject any other notions of action at a distance.

If these occurrences are due to chance, there’s very little statistical hope of their happening, considering the universe of the cell. In the average cell, which contains one molecule of protein for every ten thousand molecules of water, molecules jostle around the cell like a handful of tennis balls floating about in a swimming pool. The central problem with the current theory is that it is too dependent upon chance and also requires a good deal of time. It can’t begin to account for the speed of biological processes, like anger, joy, sadness or fear. But if instead each molecule has its own signature frequency, its receptor or molecule with the matching spectrum of features would tune into this frequency, much as your radio tunes into a specific station, even over vast distances, or one tuning fork causes another tuning fork to oscillate at the same frequency. They get in resonance – the vibration of one body is reinforced by the vibration of another body at or near its frequency. As these two molecules resonate on the same wavelength, they would then begin to resonate with the next molecules in the biochemical reaction, thus creating, in Benveniste’s words, a ‘cascade’ of electromagnetic impulses travelling at the speed of light. This, rather than accidental collision, would better explain how you initiate a virtually instantaneous chain reaction in biochemistry. It also is a logical extension of the work of Fritz Popp. If photons in the body excite molecules along the entire spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies, it is logical that they would have their own signature frequency.

Benveniste’s experiments decisively demonstrated that cells don’t rely on the happenstance of collision but on electromagnetic signalling at low frequency (less than 20 kHz) electromagnetic waves. The electromagnetic frequencies that Benveniste has studied correspond with frequencies in the audio range, even though they don’t emit any actual noise that we can detect. All sounds on our planet – the sound of water rippling in a stream, a crack of thunder, a shot fired, a bird chirping – occur at low frequency, between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, the range in which the human ear can hear.

According to Benveniste’s theory, two molecules are then tuned into each other, even at long distance, and resonate to the same frequency. These two resonating molecules would then create another frequency, which would then resonate with the next molecule or group of molecules, in the next stage of the biological reaction. This would explain, in Benveniste’s view, why tiny changes in a molecule – the switching of a peptide, for example – would have a radical effect on what that molecule actually does.

This is not so farfetched, considering what we already know about how molecules vibrate. Both specific molecules and intermolecular bonds emit certain specific frequencies which can be detected billions of light-years away, through the most sensitive of modern telescopes. These frequencies have long been accepted by physicists, but no one in the biological community save Fritz-Albert Popp and his predecessors has paused to consider whether they actually have some purpose. Others before Benveniste, such as Robert O. Becker and Cyril Smith, had conducted extensive experimentation on electromagnetic frequencies in living things. Benveniste’s contribution was to show that molecules and atoms had their own unique frequencies by using modern technology both to record this frequency and to use the recording itself for cellular communication.

From 1991, Benveniste demonstrated that you could transfer specific molecular signals simply by using an amplifier and electromagnetic coils. Four years later, he was able to record and replay these signals using a multimedia computer. Over thousands of experiments, Benveniste and Guillonnet recorded the activity of the molecule on a computer and replayed it to a biological system ordinarily sensitive to that substance. In every instance, the biological system has been fooled into thinking it has been interacting with the substance itself and acted accordingly, initiating the biological chain reaction, just as it would if in the actual presence of the genuine molecule.
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Other studies have also shown that Benveniste’s team could erase these signals and stop activity in the cells through an alternating magnetic field, work they performed in collaboration with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Medudon, France. The inescapable conclusion: as Fritz-Albert Popp theorized, molecules speak to each other in oscillating frequencies. It appeared that the Zero Point Field creates a medium enabling the molecules to speak to each other nonlocally and virtually instantaneously.

The DigiBio team tested out digital biology on five types of studies: basophilic activation; neutrophilic activation; skin testing; oxygen activity; and, most recently, plasma coagulation. Like whole blood, plasma, the yellowy liquid of the blood, which carries protein and waste products, will coagulate. To control for that ability, you must first remove the calcium in the plasma, by chelating – chemically grabbing – it. If you then add water with calcium to the blood, it will coagulate, or clot. Adding heparin, a classic anti-coagulant drug, will prevent the blood from clotting, even in the presence of the calcium.

In Benveniste’s most recent study, he took a test-tube of this plasma with calcium chelated out, then added water containing calcium which has been exposed to the ‘sound’ of heparin transmitted via the signature digitized electromagnetic frequency. As with all his other experiments, the signature frequency of heparin works as though the molecules of heparin itself were there: in its presence, the blood is more reluctant than usual to coagulate.

In perhaps the most dramatic of his experiments, Benveniste showed that the signal could be sent across the world by email or mailed on a floppy disk. Colleagues of his at Northwestern University in Chicago recorded signals from ovalbumin (Ova), acetylcholine (Ach), dextran and water. The signals from the molecules were recorded on a purpose-designed transducer and a computer equipped with a sound card. The signal was then recorded on a floppy disk and sent by regular mail to the DigiBio Laboratory in Clamart. In later experiments, the signals were also sent by email as attached documents. The Clamart team then exposed ordinary water to the signals of this digital Ova or Ach or ordinary water and infused either the exposed water or the ordinary water to isolated guinea pig hearts. All the digitised water produced highly significant changes in coronary flow, compared with the controls – which just contained ordinary, non-exposed water. The effects from the digitized water were identical to effects produced on the heart by the actual substances themselves.
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Giuliano Preparata and his colleague Emilio Del Giudice, two Italian physicists at the Milan Institute for Nuclear Physics, were working on a particularly ambitious project – to explain why certain matter in the world stays in one piece. Scientists understand gases to a large extent through the laws of classical physics, but are still largely ignorant of the actual workings of liquids and solids – that is, any sort of condensed matter. Gases are easy because they consist of individual atoms or molecules which behave individually in large spaces. Where scientists have trouble is with atoms or molecules packed tightly together and how they behave as a group. Any physicist is at a loss to tell you why water doesn’t just evaporate into gas or why atoms in a chair or a tree stay that way, particularly if they are only supposed to communicate with their most immediate neighbor and be held together by short-range forces.
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Water is among the most mysterious of substances, because it is a compound formed from two gases, yet it is liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. In their studies, Del Giudice and Preparata have demonstrated mathematically that when closely packed together, atoms and molecules exhibit a collective behavior, forming what they have termed ‘coherent domains’. They are particularly interested in this phenomenon as it occurs in water. In a paper published in
Physical Review Letters
, Preparata and Del Giudice demonstrated that water molecules create coherent domains, much as a laser does. Light is normally composed of photons of many wavelengths, like colors in a rainbow, but photons in a laser have a high degree of coherence, a situation akin to a single coherent wave, like one intense color.
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These single wavelengths of water molecules appear to become ‘informed’ in the presence of other molecules – that is, they tend to polarize around any charged molecule – storing and carrying its frequency so that it may be read at a distance. This would mean that water is like a tape recorder, imprinting and carrying information whether the original molecule is still there or not. The shaking of the containers, as is done in homeopathy, appears to act as a method of speeding up this process.
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So vital is water to the transmission of energy and information that Benveniste’s own studies actually demonstrate that molecular signals cannot be transmitted in the body unless you do so in the medium of water.
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In Japan, a physicist called Kunio Yasue of the Research Institute for Information and Science, Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, also found that water molecules have some role to play in organizing discordant energy into coherent photons – a process called ‘superradiance’.
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This suggests that water, as the natural medium of all cells, acts as the essential conductor of a molecule’s signature frequency in all biological processes and that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which can be imprinted wave information. If Benveniste is right, water not only sends the signal but also amplifies it.

The most important aspect of scientific innovation is not necessarily the original discovery, but the people who copy the work. It is only the replication of initial data that legitimizes your research and convinces the orthodox scientific community that you might be onto something. Despite the virtually universal derision of Benveniste’s results by the Establishment, reputable research slowly began to appear elsewhere. In 1992, FASEB (the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) held a symposium, organized by the International Society for Bioelectricity, examining the interactions of electromagnetic fields with biological systems.
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Numerous other scientists have replicated high-dilution experiments,
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and several others have endorsed and successfully repeated experiments using digitized information for molecular communication.
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Benveniste’s latest studies were replicated eighteen times in an independent lab in Lyon, France, and in three other independent centres.