About homeopathy, Professor Madeleine Ennis of Queen's University Belfast is,
like most scientists, deeply sceptical. That a medicinal compound diluted out of existence
should still exert a therapeutic effect is an affront to conventional biochemistry and
pharmacology, based as they are on direct and palpable molecular events. The same goes
for a possible explanation of how homeopathy works: that water somehow retains a "memory"
of things once dissolved in it.
This last notion, famously promoted by French biologist Dr Jacques Benveniste, cost him
his laboratories, his funding, and ultimately his international scientific credibility.
However, it did not deter Professor Ennis who, being a scientist, was not afraid to try
to prove Benveniste wrong. So, more than a decade after Benveniste's excommunication from
the scientific mainstream, she jumped at the chance to join a large pan-European research
team, hoping finally to lay the Benveniste "heresy" to rest. But she was in for a shock:
for the team's latest results controversially now suggest that Benveniste might have been
right all along.
Back in 1985, Benveniste began experimenting with human white blood cells involved in
allergic reactions, called basophils. These possess tiny granules containing substances
such as histamine, partly responsible for the allergic response. The granules can be
stained with a special dye, but they can be decolourised (degranulated) by a substance
called anti-immunoglobulin E or aIgE. That much is standard science. What Benveniste
claimed so controversially was that he continued to observe basophil degranulation even
when the aIgE had been diluted out of existence, but only as long as each dilution step,
as with the preparation of homeopathic remedies, was accompanied by strong agitation.
After many experiments, in 1988 Benveniste managed to get an account of his work published
in Nature, speculating that the water used in the experiments must have retained a "memory"
of the original dissolved aIgE. Homeopaths rejoiced, convinced that here at last was the
hard evidence they needed to make homeopathy scientifically respectable. Celebration was
short-lived. Spearheaded by a Nature team that famously included a magician (who could
find no fault with Benveniste's methods - only his results), Benveniste was pilloried by
the scientific establishment.
A British attempt (by scientists at London's University College, published in Nature in
1993) to reproduce Benveniste's findings failed. Benveniste has been striving ever since
to get other independent laboratories to repeat his work, claiming that negative findings
like those of the British team were the result of misunderstandings of his experimental
protocols. Enter Professor Ennis and the pan-European research effort.
A consortium of four independent research laboratories in France, Italy, Belgium, and
Holland, led by Professor M Roberfroid at Belgium's Catholic University of Louvain in
Brussels, used a refinement of Benveniste's original experiment that examined another
aspect of basophil activation. The team knew that activation of basophil degranulation
by aIgE leads to powerful mediators being released, including large amounts of histamine,
which sets up a negative feedback cycle that curbs its own release. So the experiment
the pan-European team planned involved comparing inhibition of basophil aIgE-induced
degranulation with "ghost" dilutions of histamine against control solutions of pure water.
In order to make sure no bias was introduced into the experiment by the scientists
from the four laboratories involved, they were all "blinded" to the contents of their
test solutions. In other words, they did not know whether the solutions they were adding
to the basophil-aIgE reaction contained ghost amounts of histamine or just pure water.
But that's not all. The ghost histamine solutions and the controls were prepared in
three different laboratories that had nothing further to do with the trial.
The whole experiment was co-ordinated by an independent researcher who coded all the
solutions and collated the data, but was not involved in any of the testing or analysis
of the data from the experiment. Not much room, therefore, for fraud or wishful thinking.
So the results when they came were a complete surprise.
Three of the four labs involved in the trial reported a statistically significant
inhibition of the basophil degranulation reaction by the ghost histamine solutions
compared with the controls. The fourth lab gave a result that was almost significant,
so the total result over all four labs was positive for the ghost histamine solutions.
Still, Professor Ennis was not satisfied. "In this particular trial, we stained the
basophils with a dye and then hand-counted those left coloured after the histamine-inhibition
reaction. You could argue that human error might enter at this stage." So she used a
previously developed counting protocol that could be entirely automated. This involved
tagging activated basophils with a monoclonal antibody that could be observed via
fluorescence and measured by machine.
The result, shortly to be published in Inflammation Research, was the same: histamine
solutions, both at pharmacological concentrations and diluted out of existence, lead
to statistically significant inhibition of basophile activation by aIgE, confirming
previous work in this area.
"Despite my reservations against the science of homeopathy," says Ennis, "the results
compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for a rational explanation
for our findings." She is at pains to point out that the pan-European team have not
reproduced Benveniste's findings nor attempted to do so.
Jacques Benveniste is unimpressed. "They've arrived at precisely where we started
12 years ago!" he says. Benveniste believes he already knows what constitutes the
water-memory effect and claims to be able to record and transmit the "signals" of
biochemical substances around the world via the internet. These, he claims, cause
changes in biological tissues as if the substance was actually present.
The consequences for science if Benveniste and Ennis are right could be earth shattering,
requiring a complete re-evaluation of how we understand the workings of chemistry,
biochemistry, and pharmacology.
One thing however seems certain. Either Benveniste will now be brought in from
the cold, or Professor Ennis and the rest of the scientists involved in the
pan-European experiment could be joining him there.