Electromagnetic Signature of Molecules - Biological Communication

[Another God]

I had never really heard anything about this, and now that I am reading about it, I am finding the results convincing. (Although I am still only just starting to get my hands on the actual results themselves, so I can't be certain yet).

I am talking about work done on measuring the frequency signature of molecules, recording that signature, and then using that signature to influence other molecules. Sounds crazy to the average biologist, I know, but that doesn't stop the fact that it is being done. (apparently)
Digibio is the name of the company which is run by Dr Beneniste who was one of the pioneers of the work. the sorts of experiments they do are where the put an Immunoglobin in a solution, measure the EM of it, save that EM to disk orwhatever, and then play that EM frequency back to the antibody that the Immunoglobin typically interacts: The result is the same as if they added the Immunoglobin to the antibody directly.

The claim is that molecular interaction isn't a direct physical contact interaction as it is so commonly thought of, but instead that it is a 'spooky action at a distance' via EM waves. Each molecule produces its own particular frequency signature, and biological mechanisms run according to these signatures being produced by the proteins/DNA/RNA molecules present at any given time.

The other implication of their studies, is that water holds a memory of this EM signature, and water which has disolved a particular protein or whatever gets imprinted with this signature. If the solution is then diluted to the nth degree, so that no molecules could be left within the solution, the water should still hold the activity of the molecule that was once present in it. Yes, this is exactly what Homeopathy has always claimed to be the case.

No, none of this is 'accetped' by the scientific community, but that is not a reason to dismiss it. I am posting this because I ahve never heard of it, and I have not yet been shown that there is anything wrong with it. It appears to answer many problems of biology, and hasn't said anything which 'Can't possibly be', so I am open to it.

I find this all quite exciting.

 

[Another God]

FYI: i found out about this in a Book The Field by Lynne McTaggart. I am not always appreciative of the author's...angle on things, and feel like she is just put her journalistic touch of the melodramatic into everything, while always presenting a biased opinion of it, but nonetheless it is the descriptions of the scientific work that has been done that I am interested in. That is why I came online to start looking up some of the papers myself (But I can't seem to get into them at the moment... I'll do it ina few days.)

If you want to look around at some of the information on it yourself, possibly two of the most important names who started this work are Jacques Benveniste and Fritz-Albert Popp, while a paper by Benveniste was published in Nature:
E. Davenas et al., 'Human basophil degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE', Nature, 1988; 333(6176):816-8
while the editorial reply to the article was published shortly after:
J. Maddox, et al., 'High-dilution experiments a delusion', Nature, 1988; 334:287-90

i am interested in reading the nature articles, particularly the refutation by the editor, but am unable to get my hands on it atm. Although there is an apparent refutation even in the same journal which printed the initial paper, much more work has been done, and more successes have followed, so I am open to the very possiblity that the refutation was just the automatic backlash to anything extremely new/unexplainable within the current paradigm

 

[iansmith]

AG

I have seen the experiement you are talking about. It has been refute twice experiementally and failed the million dollar challenge (http://www.randi.org/research/). Nobody has been able to replicated the results of the "memory of water" experiment when the samples are not explicitly labeled.

 

[Bystander]

This has been a premise of so-so to really bad sci-fi for a long time --- think about it --- water "remembers" biomolecules? Three translations, three rotations, and three vibrations are going to "code" DNA?

 

[Another God]

Th references I gave in the second post are for the original article, and then the counter claim made by the Nature Editor, who was accompanied by Randi and someone else. But honestly, just because they 'refuted' it, doesn't mean it is automatically BS. Just looking at history you can see very powerful refutations of nearly every major scientific advancement that is currently accepted.

If what you say is true though, that 'no-one' has been able to repeat the experiment, then I can accept that. My problem though, is that you say that, and yet Benvenistes site and the book I am reading all say that it has been done time and time again, by different labs all over the world and it is gaining a following.

Either that is total BS and it is only gaining a following of people who want to believe in it, but aren't scientists at all.

A nice simple counter claim presented against it though, is the thought that chemists have been doing chemistry for several hundred years now, and to think that no one, in all that time diluted something down to far and found out that its activity picked up...is quite unbelievable. So on those grounds, it is less likely.

But a simple denial by some people dedicated to disproving things, isn't a strong enough argument on its own.

As for the explicit labelling, I can't see how that is a problem. Labeled or not, the water is suppposed to do something: It is supposed to...react to an antigen or whatever. it either does or doesn't, no matter what the label says.

Originally posted by Bystander
Three translations, three rotations, and three vibrations are going to "code" DNA?

Um, I don't know what you mean by that. There is no denial that the DNA Code is still in its Base pairs, but there is a claim about molecules having a particular code to them...

I think I understand your point now: You couldn't encode all of the enormity of DNA, such a large molecule, such a complex molecule, and one of three translations etc, all into one EM frequency. Good point, perhaps DNA has localities? Infact, it seems most reasonable to assume that each area, each charged body in a molecule has its affect, and that combined effect gives it its signature, while in the case of extremely large particle, there is no one signature because it is a mass of signature spread out.

But the point isn't to claim that DNA does what it does because of its signature, but that molecular interaction is guided by their signatures.

I came to think about it like this: Instead of each molecule being a Cog in a machine, each molecule is more like an Antenna. When a particular enzyme is encoded, that protein then puts out the signal (in a very limited area) of 'Hey, I'm a particular enzyme and I am here, do what needs to be done now', rather than the currently accepted model being that the enzyme has to move around randomly until it happens to bump into its substrates.

The EM version at least gives a more straightforward explanation of cellular automation. In effect, if there is any truth to this, it allows cellular effects to be communication at the speed of light.

PS: First chance I get when I start honours, I am going to try out some simple dilutions myself. It can't be too hard to test this can it?

 

[Monique]

Originally posted by Another God
PS: First chance I get when I start honours, I am going to try out some simple dilutions myself. It can't be too hard to test this can it?

AG, if you dilute a sample, it is well known that the activity decreases, right? Have you ever done spectrometric measurements? You make a dilution line from, I don't know, 1:10 to 1:1000 and then you correlate the points, which are on a straight line with an correlation coefficient of r=.999 So I guess your experiment won't be necessary?

Also, if the EM signatures would be key for protein interactions, and if the interaction can be simulated by EM emmision.. does it mean that all the 3D modeling of proteins and their bindingpockets is meaningless?

Let me know when you dust off the library copies of the articles, since I DO think it is an interesting idea.

 

[iansmith]

Originally posted by Another God
As for the explicit labelling, I can't see how that is a problem. Labeled or not, the water is suppposed to do something: It is supposed to...react to an antigen or whatever. it either does or doesn't, no matter what the label says.

It migth matter. Who ever is doing the experiment migth not treat the control the same way has the sample coming from antigen dilution. That migth be the reason why when samples are not explicitly labeled no significant differences is observed. For the refutal they did 2 parrallel experiment and use 3 or 4 different lab. One did the first set of dilution, the second did the second set of dilution, and another did the experiment using white blood cell and counted them using two different methods.

the result of experiment of the memory of water has been replicated succefully when the label was explicit but I have not seen the stats yet. You migth see a difference but statisticly speaking it is not significant. The sample size migth not be large enough too.

Anyway, it migth work in vitro but is it significant in vivo.

Originally posted by Another God
PS: First chance I get when I start honours, I am going to try out some simple dilutions myself. It can't be too hard to test this can it?B]

The dilution is easy, we do it all the time with for bacterial count and for molecular bio. The testing of the effect migth be the more complicated part. You need acces to immune system cell and a method of counting the cells.

 

[Another God]

Does there need to be cells present? I am imagining some simple biochemical reaction... ATP reacting with something...to produce NADH or whatever. Some sort of reaction where there is a change in their spectrophotometer readings... Find one of those reactions, and then get ATP, dilute it down into nothingness and add it to the reaction. Either the reaction occurs, or nothing happens. Seems simple enough to me, and if what they are saying has any basis to it, then it should be just as applicable to ATP as it is to any other molecule right?

 

[Bystander]

"Dilution to zero" concentration is one of those "things" we all play with in our minds at one stage or another in our training or practice of wet chemical professions --- and, it's one of those "things" to which we all apply our intuitions --- that translates as, "We all come up with horribly wrong conclusions about concentrations and activities for the solutions we prepare during the later (low concentration) steps of the dilution process." Without actual measurements of adsorption isotherms for specific materials on the actual "glassware" (or plastic, or gold plate, or whatever) surfaces being used in the various dilution steps, no quantitative statements of concentration can be made --- qualitatively, once solutions get into the part(s) per million range, you can assume 10-90% of the material "in solution" is actually adsorbed on the surface of the glassware. Therefore, it makes an enormous difference what procedure is used --- empty the flask and refill with water? or, remove a sample from the flask by pipet to be diluted in another flask? The first method is guaranteed to give you extraordinary activities in zero concentration solutions --- the second, depending upon technique and materials can do the same.

Bottom line? Volumetric dilution as a method for preparing dilute solutions is NON-LINEAR at low concentrations, and can/has produce/d some really unusual results.

 

[Monique]

Originally posted by Another God
Some sort of reaction where there is a change in their spectrophotometer readings...

A spectrophotometer won't be able to detect such low readings.

 

[Another God]

Thanks a lot for that point Bystander, it had never crossed my mind . I'll be sure to move the sample across to new containers of pure water. Even if it is non-linear, that is not the point, the point is that they claim that after diluting it down into nothing, it actually gains activity. If I see no large (And I am looking for large) gain in activity, then I will quickly give up everything they claim.

Monique, I fear you have missed the point. The spectrophotometer shouldn't need to pick up such low concentrations: The reaction should proceed just like normal. As if you had added the substance itself. The spectrophotometer should read just like it reads every other measurement it makes.

The more I think about it though, the less likely it will actually happen. I mean, in a reaction where the substrate is actually used up in the reaction, how will the water 'memory' of this act? In a reaction a particular concentration of substrate is required to make the reaction actually do anything noticable, but how does the water remember the concentration if it only has a memory of the actual signature of the molecule itself? it is all seeming a little more strange... But still, I don't like dismissing anything out of hand. So I'm still curious.

 

[Monique]

Originally posted by Another God
Monique, I fear you have missed the point. The spectrophotometer shouldn't need to pick up such low concentrations: The reaction should proceed just like normal. As if you had added the substance itself. The spectrophotometer should read just like it reads every other measurement it makes.

I which case you have missed my point, let me repost it:

AG, if you dilute a sample, it is well known that the activity decreases, right? Have you ever done spectrometric measurements? You make a dilution line from, I don't know, 1:10 to 1:1000 and then you correlate the points, which are on a straight line with an correlation coefficient of r=.999 So I guess your experiment won't be necessary?

How would you explain that this simple dilution experiment yields a linear result??

 

[Another God]

I am not trying to explain anything, all I want to know is whether the experimental results that are claimed to be achieved are actually being achieved in any sense.

Those results are that the normal dilution process proceeds as normal (this really can't be disputed it has been done that many million times over), and then when u get down into the dilution parts where thereis absolutely nothing there, then the reactivity of the molecule that you had just diluted down to nothingness picks up again.

 

[Another God]

Originally posted by iansmith
Nobody has been able to replicated the results of the "memory of water" experiment when the samples are not explicitly labeled.

I was just looking around his site again a bit more, and while nothing is mentioned about the 'explicitly labeled' aspect, i thought I should just post a link to this page which is about how many times and by who the work has been reproduced.

It would be interesting to know under what conditions these reproductions occurred and just how 'influenced' these reproductions may have been by the labels...

 

[Monique]

Originally posted by Another God
Those results are that the normal dilution process proceeds as normal (this really can't be disputed it has been done that many million times over), and then when u get down into the dilution parts where thereis absolutely nothing there, then the reactivity of the molecule that you had just diluted down to nothingness picks up again.

Yeah, so there you go: a million times dilutions have been made until nothing can be measured. But these people claim that if you keep diluting there is something to measure again?

Sounds like a statistical fluke of a 'hair dispersing the light in the spec' to me.

 

[Another God]

Originally posted by Monique
Yeah, so there you go: a million times dilutions have been made until nothing can be measured. But these people claim that if you keep diluting there is something to measure again?

Sounds like a statistical fluke of a 'hair dispersing the light in the spec' to me.

Instead of trying to rationalise all that is difficult to understand away, trying having a look at it and figuring out what is wrong with it.

I am not interested in automated dismissals.