Trick or Treatment (18 page)

The French team continued researching the idea of water memory for another two years. Throughout this period they achieved consistently positive results. For the first time ever, homeopaths could argue that here was scientific evidence to support the mechanisms underlying homeopathy.

Previously, supporters of homeopathy had been forced to rely on arguments that were far from convincing. For example, homeopaths would argue that homeopathy worked in a similar way to vaccination. Vaccination is also a treatment whereby tiny amounts of what causes an illness can be used to combat that illness. At first this seems persuasive, but there is a major difference between homeopathy and vaccination. The amounts of active ingredient used in vaccines might be tiny, perhaps just a few micrograms, but this is still vast compared to a homeopathic remedy. A vaccine contains billions of viruses or virus fragments, whereas most homeopathic remedies do not contain a single molecule of the active ingredient. The flawed analogy between vaccines and homeopathy has been promoted by homeopaths since the nineteenth century, when Oliver Wendell Holmes rebutted it by pointing out that it was akin to ‘arguing that a pebble may produce a mountain, because an acorn can become a forest’.

Having satisfied himself that his research findings were valid, Benveniste sent a paper describing his experiments to John Maddox, editor of
Nature
. Maddox duly had the paper refereed, which is a standard procedure that allows independent scientists to check any new results and discuss whether or not the research has been conducted properly. The experimental protocol seemed to be in order, but the claims in the paper were so extraordinary that Maddox took the step of adding a disclaimer alongside the published paper. The last time that Maddox had adopted this highly unusual approach was back in 1974, when he published a paper about Uri Geller’s supposed spoon-bending powers. The disclaimer for Benveniste’s paper read: ‘Editorial reservation: Readers of this article may share the incredulity of the many referees…
Nature
has therefore arranged for independent investigators to observe repetitions of the experiments.’

In other words,
Nature
decided to publish Benveniste’s work, but with the caveat that the journal would re-check the research by sending a team of experts to visit the French laboratory. The team was led by Maddox himself, and he was joined by Walter Stewart (a chemist) and James Randi (a magician). Randi’s inclusion raised some eyebrows, but he had an international reputation for debunking extraordinary claims and uncovering scientific fraud. To illustrate his attitude, Randi would often explain that if his neighbour claimed to have a goat in the garden then he would probably believe him, but if the neighbour said he had a unicorn then Randi would probably want to check how firmly its horn was attached. Randi had established himself as one of the world’s leading sceptics back in 1964, when he hit the headlines by offering a reward of $10,000 to anyone who could prove the existence of any paranormal phenomenon, which included therapies such as homeopathy that are contrary to the principles of science. The prize fund had steadily increased to $1 million by 1988, so if the team endorsed Benveniste’s result then it would lead to Randi writing out a very large cheque to the Frenchman.

The investigation started within a week of the paper’s publication. It lasted four days and involved replicating the key experiment, with Maddox, Stewart and Randi monitoring every stage and checking for flaws in the procedure. They observed the handling of several test tubes containing basophil blood cells, some of which were treated with the homeopathic allergen solution, while the rest were treated with plain water and acted as a control. The task of analysing the test tubes was given to Elisabeth Davenas, Benveniste’s assistant, and yet again the result was the same as it had been for the last two years. More of the homeopathically treated cells showed an allergic response than the control cells, implying that the homeopathic solution had genuinely triggered a reaction in the blood cells. Even though the homeopathic solution no longer contained any allergen, its ‘memory’ of the allergen seemed to be having an impact. The experiment had been successfully replicated.

The investigators, however, were still not convinced. When Davenas analysed the test tubes she knew exactly which ones had been treated with the homeopathic solution, so the investigators were concerned that her analysis might have been deliberately or unconsciously biased. In Chapter 2 we discussed the issue of blinding, which means that patients in a trial should not be aware of whether they are receiving the real treatment or the placebo control treatment. Blinding is equally applicable to doctors and scientists. They should not be aware of whether they are administering or studying the real or the control treatment. The aim of blinding is to minimize bias, and to avoid anybody being influenced by their expectations.

Consequently, the
Nature
team requested Davenas to repeat the analysis, but only after they had blinded her to the contents of the test tubes. Maddox, Randi and Stewart went into a separate room, blanked out the windows with newspapers, removed the labels from the test tubes and replaced them with secret codes that they would later use to identify which samples had been treated with homeopathic solution and which had been treated with water. Davenas repeated her analysis, while colleagues from around the laboratory gathered to await the final result. The Amazing Randi, as he is known on stage, amused the crowd with a few card tricks to help ease the tension.

Eventually Davenas completed her analysis. The secret codes were revealed and the
Nature
team identified which test tubes had been treated homeopathically. This time the results showed that the basophils in the homeopathically treated samples had not reacted differently from the control basophils treated with plain water. The experiment had failed to demonstrate the sort of effects that Benveniste had been finding for the last two years. The results showed no evidence to support homeopathy, and instead they were in line with conventional scientific thinking and all the known laws of physics, chemistry and biology. Some of Benveniste’s colleagues burst into tears at the announcement.

Subsequently it emerged that Benveniste had never personally conducted any of the experiments, but had always left everything to Davenas. Moreover, she had always conducted the analysis in an unblinded manner. This meant that it was highly likely that she had accidentally and consistently introduced biases into the results, particularly as she herself was already a strong believer in the power of homeopathy and was keen to prove its efficacy.

When
Nature
published the results of its investigation, the journal pointed out several problems with Benveniste’s approach to research. These criticisms included statements such as: ‘We believe that experimental data have been uncritically assessed and their imperfections inadequately reported.’ Moreover, the journal highlighted the fact that two of the researchers who had contributed to Benveniste’s original paper had been partially funded by a French homeopathic company with an annual turnover of over  100 million. Corporate funding is not necessarily problematic, but such potential conflicts of interest had not been formally disclosed. Despite these criticisms, the
Nature
investigators were keen to stress that they were not accusing Benveniste of deliberate fraud, but merely that he and his team were deluding themselves and had not been conducting their experiments rigorously.

A lack of rigour, particularly a lack of blinding, can seriously bias any scientific result even for the most honest and well-intentioned scientist. Imagine the following scenario: a scientist has staked his reputation on the hypothesis that men have superior spatial awareness and motor skills, and he thinks he can demonstrate that this is the case by inviting men and women to draw freehand circles and then comparing the quality of their drawings. The experiment begins – the men and women draw their circles, they write their names at the top of the papers, the drawings are collected by an assistant and handed to the scientist, who judges the circles by eye and gives each one marks out of ten. However, because he can see the names of the artists at the top of each drawing, he might be tempted subconsciously to mark the men’s circles more generously. Consequently, regardless of the truth, it is more likely that the resulting data would support his hypothesis that men are better than women at drawing circles. By contrast, if the experiment were to be repeated and the artists were given numbers to disguise their gender temporarily, then the prejudiced scientist becomes blinded and is more likely to give a fairer assessment of each circle. The new result is likely to be more reliable.

In the Benveniste case, the problem was that Davenas was unblinded and prejudiced in favour of homeopathy, and this combination of factors could have biased her results. In particular, Davenas’s experiments required her to judge whether a homeopathic preparation caused blood cells to exhibit an allergic reaction, which is not a clear-cut decision, even when the cells are viewed through a microscope. Indeed, judging the extent of a cell’s allergic reaction is similar to examining a circle’s roundness: both are equally prone to personal interpretation and bias.

For example, Davenas would have come across many borderline cases – has the cell undergone an allergic reaction or not? There might have been a subconscious temptation to judge such borderline cells as exhibiting allergic reactions if she knew that they had been treated homeopathically. Or she might have been subconsciously tempted to give the opposite judgement if she knew that they had been treated with plain water. However, by asking Davenas to repeat the experiment without any labels on the test tubes, the
Nature
investigators ensured that she was blind and unbiased in her decisions; whereupon the homeopathic solutions and water led to similar results. A fair test had shown that the homeopathic solutions had no impact on the basophil cells.

While Benveniste readily accepted some elements of the criticism, he steadfastly defended the core of his research and argued that the results that he had accumulated over the course of two years could not be negated by what the
Nature
team had observed in just a few days. He explained that the mistakes that had been witnessed by Maddox, Randi and Stewart were caused by the unusual circumstances, namely that his team was working under intense pressure and in the media spotlight.

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:

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.