Water memory
| Claims | Under certain circumstances water can retain a "memory" of solute particles after arbitrarily large dilution. |
|---|---|
| Related scientific disciplines | Homeopathy, Alternative Medicine, Pseudoscience |
| Year proposed | 1988 |
| Original proponents | Jacques Benveniste |
| Subsequent proponents |
Madeleine Ennis Brian Josephson Luc Montagnier Various homeopaths |
| Pseudoscientific concepts | |
Water memory is the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances previously dissolved in it even after an arbitrary number of serial dilutions. It has been claimed to be a mechanism by which homeopathic remedies work, even though they are diluted to the point that no single molecule of the original substance remains.
Water memory defies conventional scientific understanding of physical chemistry knowledge and is not accepted by the scientific community. In 1988, Jacques Benveniste published a study supporting a water memory effect amid controversy in Nature, accompanied by an editorial by Nature's editor John Maddox urging readers to "suspend judgement" until the results could be replicated. In the years following publication, multiple supervised experiments were run by Benveniste's team, the United States Department of Defense, BBC's Horizon programme, and other researchers, but no team has ever reproduced Benveniste's results in controlled conditions.
Benveniste was a French immunologist who sought to demonstrate the plausibility of homeopathic remedies "independently of homeopathic interests" in a major scientific journal. To that end, Benveniste and his team at Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM, French for National Institute of Health and Medical Research) diluted a solution of human antibodies in water to such a degree that there was virtually no possibility that a single molecule of the antibody remained in the water solution. Nonetheless, they reported, human basophils responded to the solutions just as though they had encountered the original antibody (part of the allergic reaction). The effect was reported only when the solution was shaken violently during dilution. Benveniste stated: "It's like agitating a car key in the river, going miles downstream, extracting a few drops of water, and then starting one's car with the water." At the time, Benveniste offered no theoretical explanation for the effect, which was later called "water memory" by a journalist reporting on the study.
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