In 1988, Benveniste and colleagues published a paper in Nature describing the action of very high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody on the degranulation of human basophils, findings that seemed to support the concept of homeopathy.
[2] After the article was published, a follow-up investigation was set up by a team including John Maddox, James Randi and Walter Stewart.
[3] He qualified as a physician in 1960 and practised medicine in Paris before taking a research job in cancer at the Scripps Clinic in California.
Using lab rats and mice, he found that ionophore A23187 (a mobile ion carrier that allows the passage of Mn2+, Ca2+ and Mg2+ and has antibiotic properties against bacteria and fungi) caused the release of PAF.
Benveniste began experimenting and in 1988 published a paper in the prestigious scientific journal Nature describing the action of very high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody on the degranulation of human basophils.
[3] A week after publication of the article, Nature sent a team of three investigators to Benveniste's lab to attempt to replicate his results under controlled conditions.
The team consisted of Nature editor and physicist Sir John Maddox, American scientific fraud investigator and chemist Walter W. Stewart, and skeptic and former magician James Randi.
[8] Since multiple readings of the samples were closer than statistically expected for the non-double blind tests, the team argued that unintentional bias was the culprit.
[9][10][11] On 3 September 1988, Channel 4 broadcast an After Dark television discussion featuring among others Benveniste, James Randi, Walter Stewart and Jonathan Miller.
[12] In 1991, the French Academy of Sciences published his latest results, obtained under the supervision of Alfred Spira, a statistician, in its weekly Proceedings.
Benveniste gained the public support of Brian Josephson,[14] a Nobel laureate physicist with a reputation for openness to paranormal claims.
When he heard of this, Randi offered to throw in the long-standing $1 million prize for any positive demonstration of the paranormal, to which Benveniste replied: "Fine to us.
With the support of Josephson, the experiments continued, culminating in a 1997 paper claiming a water memory effect could be transmitted over phone lines.