Something from another list about structured water to chew on:
Chuck
Why do overlook and oversee mean opposite things?
On Tue, 13 Nov 2001 09:40:25 -0600, "d.linen" <[email protected]> wrote:
Bizarre chemical discovery gives homeopathic hint
News/Current Events
Source: The New Scientist
Published: 7 NOV 01 Author: Andy Coghlan
It is a chance discovery so unexpected it defies belief and threatens to
reignite debate about whether there is a scientific
basis for thinking homeopathic medicines really work.
A team in South Korea has discovered a whole new dimension to just about
the simplest chemical reaction in the book -
what happens when you dissolve a substance in water and then add more
water.
Conventional wisdom says that the dissolved molecules simply spread
further and further apart as a solution is diluted. But
two chemists have found that some do the opposite: they clump together,
first as clusters of molecules, then as bigger
aggregates of those clusters. Far from drifting apart from their
neighbours, they got closer together.
The discovery has stunned chemists, and could provide the first
scientific insight into how some homeopathic remedies
work. Homeopaths repeatedly dilute medications, believing that the
higher the dilution, the more potent the remedy
becomes.
Some dilute to "infinity" until no molecules of the remedy remain. They
believe that water holds a memory, or "imprint" of the
active ingredient which is more potent than the ingredient itself. But
others use less dilute solutions - often diluting a remedy
six-fold. The Korean findings might at last go some way to reconciling
the potency of these less dilute solutions with
orthodox science.
Completely counterintuitive
German chemist Kurt Geckeler and his colleague Shashadhar Samal stumbled
on the effect while investigating fullerenes at
their lab in the Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South
Korea. They found that the football-shaped buckyball
molecules kept forming untidy aggregates in solution, and Geckler asked
Samal to look for ways to control how these
clumps formed.
What he discovered was a phenomenon new to chemistry. "When he diluted
the solution, the size of the fullerene particles
increased," says Geckeler. "It was completely counterintuitive," he
says.
Further work showed it was no fluke. To make the otherwise insoluble
buckyball dissolve in water, the chemists had mixed it
with a circular sugar-like molecule called a cyclodextrin. When they did
the same experiments with just cyclodextrin
molecules, they found they behaved the same way. So did the organic
molecule sodium guanosine monophosphate, DNA
and plain old sodium chloride.
Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10
times as big as those in the original solutions. The
growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the
original.
"The history of the solution is important. The more dilute it starts,
the larger the aggregates," says Geckeler. Also, it only
worked in polar solvents like water, in which one end of the molecule
has a pronounced positive charge while the other end
is negative.
Biologically active
But the finding may provide a mechanism for how some homeopathic
medicines work - something that has defied scientific
explanation till now. Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the
particles to the point when they become biologically
active.
It also echoes the controversial claims of French immunologist Jacques
Benveniste. In 1988, Benveniste claimed in a Nature
paper that a solution that had once contained antibodies still activated
human white blood cells. Benveniste claimed the
solution still worked because it contained ghostly "imprints" in the
water structure where the antibodies had been.
Other researchers failed to reproduce Benveniste's experiments, but
homeopaths still believe he may have been onto
something. Benveniste himself does not think the new findings explain
his results because the solutions were not dilute
enough. "This [phenomenon] cannot apply to high dilution," he says.
Fred Pearce of University College London, who tried to repeat
Benveniste's experiments, agrees. But it could offer some
clues as to why other less dilute homeopathic remedies work, he says.
Large clusters and aggregates might interact more
easily with biological tissue.
Double-check
Chemist Jan Enberts of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands is
more cautious. "It's still a totally open question," he
says. "To say the phenomenon has biological significance is pure
speculation." But he has no doubt Samal and Geckeler
have discovered something new. "It's surprising and worrying," he says.
The two chemists were at pains to double-check their astonishing
results. Initially they had used the scattering of a laser to
reveal the size and distribution of the dissolved particles. To check,
they used a scanning electron microscope to
photograph films of the solutions spread over slides. This, too, showed
that dissolved substances cluster together as dilution
increased.
"It doesn't prove homeopathy, but it's congruent with what we think and
is very encouraging," says Peter Fisher, director of
medical research at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital.
"The whole idea of high-dilution homeopathy hangs on the idea that water
has properties which are not understood," he
says. "The fact that the new effect happens with a variety of substances
suggests it's the solvent that's responsible. It's in
line with what many homeopaths say, that you can only make homeopathic
medicines in polar solvents."
Geckeler and Samal are now anxious that other researchers follow up
their work. "We want people to repeat it," says
Geckeler. "If it's confirmed it will be groundbreaking".
Journal reference: Chemical Communications (2001, p 2224)
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