Biochemical Basis

Professor Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who won the Nobel Prize for discovering a link between HIV and AIDS has demonstrated that water has a memory that continues even after many dilutions. The idea is one of the foundations of homeopathy, which maintains that the potency of a substance is increased with its dilution. Montagnier has discovered that solutions containing the DNA of viruses and bacteria “could emit low frequency radio waves”. These waves influence molecules around them, and turn them into organised structures. (Sources: Sunday Times, July 4, 2010; British Medical Association).

This echoes the claims of French immunologist Jacques Benveniste who in 1988 claimed in a Nature paper that a solution that had once contained antibodies still activated human white blood cells. Benveniste claimed the solution still worked because it contained ghostly “imprints” in the water structure where the antibodies had been.

These discoveries also the support the findings of a 2001 a research team in South Korea (German chemist Kurt Geckeler and his colleague Shashadhar Samal) concerning what happens when a substance diluted in water is then further diluted. Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together, first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their neighbors, they got closer together.

Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original. “The history of the solution is important. The more dilute it starts, the larger the aggregates,” says Geckeler. Also, it only worked in polar solvents like water, in which one end of the molecule has a pronounced positive charge while the other end is negative. In accordance with homeopathic theory, diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active.

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