The Field

by Lynne McTaggart

  Benveniste’s experiments decisively demonstrated that cells don’t rely on the happenstance of collision but on electromagnetic signalling at low frequency (less than 20 kHz) electromagnetic waves. The electromagnetic frequencies that Benveniste has studied correspond with frequencies in the audio range, even though they don’t emit any actual noise that we can detect. All sounds on our planet – the sound of water rippling in a stream, a crack of thunder, a shot fired, a bird chirping – occur at low frequency, between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, the range in which the human ear can hear.

  According to Benveniste’s theory, two molecules are then tuned into each other, even at long distance, and resonate to the same frequency. These two resonating molecules would then create another frequency, which would then resonate with the next molecule or group of molecules, in the next stage of the biological reaction. This would explain, in Benveniste’s view, why tiny changes in a molecule – the switching of a peptide, for example – would have a radical effect on what that molecule actually does.

  This is not so farfetched, considering what we already know about how molecules vibrate. Both specific molecules and intermolecular bonds emit certain specific frequencies which can be detected billions of light-years away, through the most sensitive of modern telescopes. These frequencies have long been accepted by physicists, but no one in the biological community save Fritz-Albert Popp and his predecessors has paused to consider whether they actually have some purpose. Others before Benveniste, such as Robert O. Becker and Cyril Smith, had conducted extensive experimentation on electromagnetic frequencies in living things. Benveniste’s contribution was to show that molecules and atoms had their own unique frequencies by using modern technology both to record this frequency and to use the recording itself for cellular communication.

  From 1991, Benveniste demonstrated that you could transfer specific molecular signals simply by using an amplifier and electromagnetic coils. Four years later, he was able to record and replay these signals using a multimedia computer. Over thousands of experiments, Benveniste and Guillonnet recorded the activity of the molecule on a computer and replayed it to a biological system ordinarily sensitive to that substance. In every instance, the biological system has been fooled into thinking it has been interacting with the substance itself and acted accordingly, initiating the biological chain reaction, just as it would if in the actual presence of the genuine molecule.10 Other studies have also shown that Benveniste’s team could erase these signals and stop activity in the cells through an alternating magnetic field, work they performed in collaboration with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Medudon, France. The inescapable conclusion: as Fritz-Albert Popp theorized, molecules speak to each other in oscillating frequencies. It appeared that the Zero Point Field creates a medium enabling the molecules to speak to each other nonlocally and virtually instantaneously.

  The DigiBio team tested out digital biology on five types of studies: basophilic activation; neutrophilic activation; skin testing; oxygen activity; and, most recently, plasma coagulation. Like whole blood, plasma, the yellowy liquid of the blood, which carries protein and waste products, will coagulate. To control for that ability, you must first remove the calcium in the plasma, by chelating – chemically grabbing – it. If you then add water with calcium to the blood, it will coagulate, or clot. Adding heparin, a classic anti-coagulant drug, will prevent the blood from clotting, even in the presence of the calcium.

  In Benveniste’s most recent study, he took a test-tube of this plasma with calcium chelated out, then added water containing calcium which has been exposed to the ‘sound’ of heparin transmitted via the signature digitized electromagnetic frequency. As with all his other experiments, the signature frequency of heparin works as though the molecules of heparin itself were there: in its presence, the blood is more reluctant than usual to coagulate.

  In perhaps the most dramatic of his experiments, Benveniste showed that the signal could be sent across the world by email or mailed on a floppy disk. Colleagues of his at Northwestern University in Chicago recorded signals from ovalbumin (Ova), acetylcholine (Ach), dextran and water. The signals from the molecules were recorded on a purpose-designed transducer and a computer equipped with a sound card. The signal was then recorded on a floppy disk and sent by regular mail to the DigiBio Laboratory in Clamart. In later experiments, the signals were also sent by email as attached documents. The Clamart team then exposed ordinary water to the signals of this digital Ova or Ach or ordinary water and infused either the exposed water or the ordinary water to isolated guinea pig hearts. All the digitised water produced highly significant changes in coronary flow, compared with the controls – which just contained ordinary, non-exposed water. The effects from the digitized water were identical to effects produced on the heart by the actual substances themselves.11

  Giuliano Preparata and his colleague Emilio Del Giudice, two Italian physicists at the Milan Institute for Nuclear Physics, were working on a particularly ambitious project – to explain why certain matter in the world stays in one piece. Scientists understand gases to a large extent through the laws of classical physics, but are still largely ignorant of the actual workings of liquids and solids – that is, any sort of condensed matter. Gases are easy because they consist of individual atoms or molecules which behave individually in large spaces. Where scientists have trouble is with atoms or molecules packed tightly together and how they behave as a group. Any physicist is at a loss to tell you why water doesn’t just evaporate into gas or why atoms in a chair or a tree stay that way, particularly if they are only supposed to communicate with their most immediate neighbor and be held together by short-range forces.12

  Water is among the most mysterious of substances, because it is a compound formed from two gases, yet it is liquid at normal temperatures and pressures. In their studies, Del Giudice and Preparata have demonstrated mathematically that when closely packed together, atoms and molecules exhibit a collective behavior, forming what they have termed ‘coherent domains’. They are particularly interested in this phenomenon as it occurs in water. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, Preparata and Del Giudice demonstrated that water molecules create coherent domains, much as a laser does. Light is normally composed of photons of many wavelengths, like colors in a rainbow, but photons in a laser have a high degree of coherence, a situation akin to a single coherent wave, like one intense color.13 These single wavelengths of water molecules appear to become ‘informed’ in the presence of other molecules – that is, they tend to polarize around any charged molecule – storing and carrying its frequency so that it may be read at a distance. This would mean that water is like a tape recorder, imprinting and carrying information whether the original molecule is still there or not. The shaking of the containers, as is done in homeopathy, appears to act as a method of speeding up this process.14 So vital is water to the transmission of energy and information that Benveniste’s own studies actually demonstrate that molecular signals cannot be transmitted in the body unless you do so in the medium of water.15 In Japan, a physicist called Kunio Yasue of the Research Institute for Information and Science, Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama, also found that water molecules have some role to play in organizing discordant energy into coherent photons – a process called ‘superradiance’.16

  This suggests that water, as the natural medium of all cells, acts as the essential conductor of a molecule’s signature frequency in all biological processes and that water molecules organize themselves to form a pattern on which can be imprinted wave information. If Benveniste is right, water not only sends the signal but also amplifies it.

  The most important aspect of scientific innovation is not necessarily the original discovery, but the people who copy the work. It is only the replication of initial data that legitimizes your research and convinces the orthodox scientific community that you might be onto something. Despite the virtually universal derision of Benveniste’s results by the
Establishment, reputable research slowly began to appear elsewhere. In 1992, FASEB (the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) held a symposium, organized by the International Society for Bioelectricity, examining the interactions of electromagnetic fields with biological systems.17 Numerous other scientists have replicated high-dilution experiments,18 and several others have endorsed and successfully repeated experiments using digitized information for molecular communication.19 Benveniste’s latest studies were replicated eighteen times in an independent lab in Lyon, France, and in three other independent centres.

  Several years after the memory of water Nature episode, scientific teams still tried to prove Benveniste wrong. Professor Madelene Ennis of Queen’s University in Belfast joined a large pan-European research team, with hopes of showing, once and for all, that homeopathy and water memory were utter nonsense. A consortium of four independent laboratories in Italy, France, Belgium and Holland, led by Professor M. Roberfroid of the Catholic University of Louvain, in Brussels, carried out a variation of Benveniste’s original experiment with basophil degranulation. The experiment was impeccable. None of the researchers knew which was the homeopathic solution and which pure water. All the solutions had even been prepared by labs which had nothing further to do with the trial. Results were also coded and decoded and tabulated by an independent researcher also unconnected with the study.

  In the end, three of four labs got statistically significant results with the homeopathic preparations. Professor Ennis still didn’t believe these results and put them down to human error. To eliminate the possible vagaries of humans, she applied an automated counting protocol to the figures she had. Nevertheless, even the automated results showed the same. The high dilutions of the active ingredient worked, whether the active ingredient was actually present or water so dilute that none of the original substance remained. Ennis was forced to concede: ‘The results compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for rational explanations for our findings.’20

  This represented the last straw to Benveniste. If Ennis’s results were negative, they would have been published in Nature, thereby forever consigning his work to the trash heap. Because their results agreed with his, they were published in a relatively obscure journal, a few years after the event, a guarantee that no one would really notice.

  Besides Ennis’s results, there were all the scientific studies of homeopathy which lent support to Benveniste’s findings. Excellent, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials showed that homeopathy works for, among many conditions, asthma,21 diarrhea,22 upper respiratory tract infections in children23 and even heart disease.24 Of at least 105 trials of homeopathy, 81 showed positive results.

  The most unassailable were carried out in Glasgow by Dr David Reilly, whose double-blind, placebo-controlled studies showed that homeopathy works for asthma, with all the usual checks and balances of a pristine scientific study.25 Despite the scientific design of the trial, an editorial in The Lancet, redolent of Nature’s response to Benveniste’s initial findings, agreed to publish the results but simply refused to accept them:

  What could be more absurd than the notion that a substance is therapeutically active in dilutions so great that the patient is unlikely to receive a single molecule of it? [said the editorial]. Yes, the dilution principle of homeopathy is absurd; so the reason for any therapeutic effect presumably lies elsewhere.26

  On reading The Lancet’s on-going debate on the Reilly studies, Benveniste couldn’t resist responding:

  This recalls, inexorably, the wonderfully self-sufficient contribution of a nineteenth-century French academician to the heated debate over the existence of meteorites, which animated the scientific community at the time: ‘Stones do not fall from the sky because there are no stones in the sky.’27

  Benveniste was so tired of laboratories trying and sometimes failing to replicate his work that he had Guillonnet build him a robot. Nothing much more than a box with an arm which moves in three directions, the robot could handle everything but the initial measuring. All one had to do was to hand it the bare ingredients plus a bit of plastic tubing, push the button and leave. The robot would take the water containing calcium, place it into a coil, play the heparin signal for five minutes, so that the water is ‘informed’, then mix the informed water in its test-tube with the plasma, put the mixture in a measuring device, read the results and offer them up to whoever is doing the investigation. Benveniste and his team carried out hundreds of experiments using their robot, but the main idea was to hand out a batch of these devices to other labs. In this way, both the other centres and the Clamart team can ensure that the experiment is universally standardized and an identical protocol carried out correctly.

  While working with his robot, Benveniste discovered on a large scale what Popp had witnessed in the laboratory with his water fleas – evidence that the electromagnetic waves from living things were having an effect on their environment.

  Once Benveniste had got his robot up and working, he discovered that generally it worked well, except for certain occasions. Those occasions were always the days when a particular woman was present in the lab. Cherchez la femme, Benveniste thought, although in the Lyon lab, which was replicating their results, a similar situation occurred, this time with a man. In his own lab, Benveniste conducted several experiments, by hand and by robot, to isolate what it was the woman was doing which prevented the experiment from working. Her scientific method was impeccable and she followed the protocol to the letter. The woman herself, a doctor and biologist, was an experienced, meticulous worker. Nevertheless, on no occasion did she get any results. After six months of such studies there was only a single conclusion: something about her very presence was preventing a positive result.

  It was vital that he got to the nub of the problem, for Jacques knew what was at stake. He might send his robot to a laboratory in Cambridge, and if they got poor results as a result of a particular person, the lab would conclude that the experiment itself was at fault, when the problem had to do with something or someone in the environment.

  There is nothing subtle about biological effects. Change the structure or shape of a molecule only slightly and you will completely alter the ability of the molecule to slot in with its receptor cells. On or off, success or failure. A drug works or it doesn’t. In this case, something in the woman in question was completely interfering with the communication of cells in his experiment.

  Benveniste suspected that the woman must be emitting some form of waves that were blocking the signals. Through his work he developed a means of testing for these, and he soon discovered that she was emitting electromagnetic fields which were interfering with the communication signalling of his experiment. Like Popp’s carcinogenic substances, she was a frequency scrambler. This seemed too incredible to believe – more the realm of witchcraft than science, Benveniste thought. He then had the particular woman hold a tube of homeopathic granules in her hand for five minutes, and then tested the tube with his equipment. All activity – all molecular signaling – had been erased.28

  Benveniste wasn’t a theorist. He wasn’t even a physicist. He’d accidentally trespassed into the world of electromagnetism and now was stuck here, experimenting in what for him was completely foreign territory – the memory of water and the ability of molecules to vibrate at very high and very low frequencies. These were the two mysteries that he was getting no closer to solving. All that he could do was to carry on where he felt most comfortable – with his laboratory experiments – showing that these effects were real. But one thing did seem clear to him. For some unknown reason that he didn’t dwell upon, these signals also appeared to be sent outside the body and somehow were being taken in and listened to.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Resonating with the World

  VIRTUALLY EVERY EXPERIMENT HAD been a failure. The rats were not performing as expected. The entire point of the exercise, as far as Karl Lashley was concerned, had been to find where the en
grams were – the precise location in the brain where memories were stored. The name ‘engram’ had been coined by Wilder Penfield in the 1920s after he thought he’d discovered that memories had an exact address in the brain. Penfield had performed extraordinary research on epileptic patients with anaesthetized scalps while they were fully conscious, showing that if he stimulated certain parts of their brains with electrodes, specific scenes from their past could be evoked in living color and excruciating detail. Even more amazingly, whenever he had stimulated the same spot in the brain (often unbeknownst to the patient) it seemed to elicit the same flashback, with the same level of detail.

  Penfield, and an army of scientists after him, naturally concluded that certain portions of the brain were allotted to hold captive specific memories. Every last detail of our lives had been carefully encoded in specific spots in the brain, like guests at a restaurant placed at certain tables by a particularly exacting maitre d’. All we needed to find was who was sitting where – and, perhaps as a bonus, who the maitre d’ was.

  For nearly 30 years Lashley, a renowned American neuropsychologist, had been looking for engrams. It was 1946, and at his laboratory at the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology in Florida, he’d been searching across all sorts of species to find out what it was in the brain – or where it was – that was responsible for memory. He’d thought that he would be amplifying Penfield’s findings, when all he seemed to be doing was proving him wrong. Lashley tended to the hypercritical, and small wonder. It was as though his life’s entire oeuvre had a singularly negative purpose: to disprove all the work of his forebears. The other gospel of the time that still held the scientific community in thrall, but which Lashley was busily disproving, was the notion that every psychological process had a measurable physical manifestation – the move of a muscle, the secretion of a chemical. Once again, the brain was simply, fussily, the maitre d’. Although he’d mainly been working in primate research in his early work, he’d then moved onto rats. He’d built them a jumping stand, where they learned to jump through miniature doors to reach a reward of food. To underscore the object of the exercise, those that didn’t respond correctly fell into pond water.1