[5] 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.
There was concern on the part of Nature's editorial oversight board that the material, if published, would lend credibility to homeopathic practitioners even if the effects were not replicable.
333 on 30 June 1988,[1] but it was accompanied with an editorial by Maddox that noted "There are good and particular reasons why prudent people should, for the time being, suspend judgement" and described some of the fundamental laws of chemistry and physics which it would violate, if shown to be true.
[15] Maddox's team concluded "that there is no substantial basis for the claim that anti-IgE at high dilution (by factors as great as 10120) retains its biological effectiveness, and that the hypothesis that water can be imprinted with the memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful."
Maddox's team initially speculated that someone in the lab "was playing a trick on Benveniste",[6] but later concluded that, "We believe the laboratory has fostered and then cherished a delusion about the interpretation of its data."
In his Nature letter, Benveniste also implied that Randi was attempting to hoodwink the experimental run by doing magic tricks, "distracting the technician in charge of its supervision!"
He was more apologetic on Quirks and Quarks, re-phrasing his mention of Randi to imply that he had kept the team amused with his tricks and that his presence was generally welcomed.
On the same Quirks and Quarks show, he dismissed Benveniste's complaints, stating that, because of the possibility that the results would be unduly promoted by the homeopathy community, an immediate re-test was necessary.
It continued in the French press for some time,[17] and in September Benveniste appeared on the British television discussion programme After Dark to debate the events live with Randi and others.
In spite of all the arguing over the retests, it had done nothing to stop what Maddox worried about: even in light of the tests' failure, they were still being used to claim that the experiments "prove" that homeopathy works.
[19] After the Nature controversy, Benveniste gained the public support of Brian Josephson,[20] a Nobel laureate physicist with a reputation for openness to paranormal claims.
[23] Time magazine reported in 1999 that, in response to skepticism from physicist Robert Park, Josephson had challenged the American Physical Society (APS) to oversee a replication by Benveniste.
This signature, he says, can be captured by a copper coil, digitized and transmitted by wire—or, for extra flourish, over the Internet—to a container of ordinary water, converting it to a homeopathic solution.The APS accepted the challenge and offered to cover the costs of the test.
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.
"We did not observe systematic influences such as pipetting differences, contamination, or violations in blinding or randomization that would explain these effects from the Benveniste investigator.
[30][31] Randi then forwarded the $1 million challenge to the BBC Horizon program to prove the "water memory" theory following Ennis's experimental procedure.
[33] In 2003, Louis Rey, a chemist from Lausanne, reported that frozen samples of lithium and sodium chloride solutions prepared according to homeopathic prescriptions showed – after being exposed to radiation – different thermoluminescence peaks compared with pure water.
[35] In January 2009, Luc Montagnier, the Nobel Laureate virologist who led the team that discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), claimed (in a paper published in a journal that he set up, which seems to have avoided conventional peer review as it was accepted three days after submission) that the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses massively diluted in water emit radio waves that he can detect.