Keywords: Jacques Benveniste, water memory, molecules, drugs, applications, homeopathy.

This article follows the death of Mr Beneveniste in October 2004. We would like to remind our readers of the following thing: it takes 1000 experiments to confirm a principle but only one is enough to invalidate it! And let's be wise not to be right too soon, the rest of the world won't understand.

Jacques Benveniste died

By Eric FAVEREAU

The one who had discovered a memory in the water fifteen years ago died, in pariah of research, this weekend in Paris.

Jacques Benveniste, an iconoclastic figure in French biomedical research, died this weekend, following a surgical operation in Paris. He was 69 years old.
Warm face, original researcher, and ultimately a tragic fate. Jacques Benveniste will remain the man of a controversy. In which he will have won everything. And all lost. Everything won, because for the first time in 1988 a major international scientific journal, Nature, published the report of its research in which it seemed to highlight a totally inexplicable phenomenon, magnificently baptized "the memory of water". Benveniste asserted, with supporting evidence, “that an antibody placed in aqueous solution could continue to elicit a biological reaction, while dilution reaches levels such as the chances of a single molecule of the antibody being present in the cell. solution become null ”. Miraculous result, with magnificent images. Example: a key is dropped in the sea in Brest, and a few hundred kilometers away, on the other side of the Channel, the memory of a door could open. How not to dream about this water which would thus keep all traces of the world? The aficionados of homeopathic doses could in passing rub their hands on this discovery, the homeopathic labs having admittedly largely funded its work.

Benveniste then lost everything. The same journal shortly after called on two investigators - one of whom was an internationally renowned illusionist - to try to reveal methodological biases in our researcher's experience. Unique approach in the history of scientific publications. In any case, our two investigators will unearth some methodological errors which could, in their eyes, explain these incredible results. It was, then, the beginning of a war of religions. Benveniste stumbled. Persisted, quarreled and isolated himself more and more, to don little by little the clothes of the pariah as scientific research sometimes knows how to sew. We no longer spoke of this research, we only spoke of his obsessive temperament. “Error is part of the scientific process. It's because Newton was wrong that we got Einstein. I am ostracized because I would have made a mistake ”, protested the biologist again, in 2000. While the majority of the scientific establishment of the planet had tired of his fight, this medical immunologist did not budge. not: "My experiments are in the process of being completely reproducible", he assured once again. Until the end, he continued. Losing in passing the direction of his research laboratory at Inserm.

Jacques Benveniste had not always been a researcher apart. Until his contested discovery, he had been one of the most published French scientists in immunology, his starting specialty, and the most appreciated. In 1971, his discovery of an activating factor for blood platelets had even placed him in all medical textbooks as well as on the list of nobelisables.