Friday, January 28, 2011
The decades-long dispute between Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in
France and Robert Gallo, then at the National Cancer Institute in the US,
has taken on an entirely different complexion following Montagniers public
disclosure last month of far out homeopathic convictions. What's new
reviewed homeopathy two weeks ago (http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN11/wn011411.html).
Often
described as treatment with highly dilute medicine, homeopathic dilution
typically far exceeds the dilution limit, beyond which not a single
molecule of the solute would remain. In homeopathy, less is more. Samuel
Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, called this The Law of
Infinitesimals. Luc Montagnier was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine
for his discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), while Robert Gallo
who many thought had a legitimate claim to the discovery was left out in
the cold. Interviewed by Martin Enserink for Science just a month ago
(Science, VOL 330, p.1732), Luc Montagnier explained he is leaving France
for Shanghai to escape the climate of fear surrounding mention of the
electromagnetic waves that he claims emanate from highly diluted DNA of
various pathogens, including those responsible for autism and Alzheimers.
Jaques Benveniste, who Montagnier calls a "modern Galileo," made similar
claims. Others in Europe are afraid to publish similar results according to
Montgnier, "because of the intellectual terror from people who don't
understand it."
My personal encounter with Jaques Benveniste is described in The Barbary
Duck, Chapter 9 of Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton,
2008). I met with Benveniste in 1999 to discuss a protocol for a test of
his claim that he could record the EM signals emanating from a homeopathic
solution and transmit it over the Internet to activate homeopathic
properties in a remote receptacle of water. Although the agreed-upon test
was described in Time magazine, Jacques repeatedly asked for more time to
prepare http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN99/wn051499.html
. He died seven
years later, to avoid going through with the test, or perhaps he
inadvertently sipped distilled water and died of a homeopathic overdose.
Benvenistes company, Boiron, apparently scrapped plans to deliver their
product electronically. They may be on to something: the remote water would
indeed be just as effective as other homeopathic medicine in treating
disease.
According to a story in the Albuquerque Journal, a Santa Fe resident is
taking the city and AT&T to court over Wi-Fi signal upgrades. He says he
suffers from electromagnetic hypersensitivity. It causes him insomnia,
irritability, eye pain, dizziness, nausea, and headaches, and I have the
same reaction from just writing about it. Meanwhile, however, a study by
the name of COSMOS (Cohort Study of Mobile Communications) has been
underway in Europe for more than a year. If it's anything like all the
other significant studies it will find nothing, and Devra Davis will simply
add a few more years to her estimate of the latency period for brain
cancer.
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