[escepticos] Noticias sobre 'Benveniste'...

["Eduardo Zotes Sarmiento" <diotalle@...>]

	Buenas...

Os pongo una noticia de la edicion de ayer de New Scientist, es sobre
Benveniste. Anque gran parte de lo que cuenta ya ha salido recientemente
por aqui (el asunto de Maddox y Randi), lo interesante es la ultima parte.

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                                           From New Scientist, 27 September 1997

MEMORY MAN HITS OUT, By Charles Seife

              two Nobel prizewinners are being sued for
              libel by Jacques Benveniste, the controversial French
              scientist whose research on the "memory of water",
              first published in 1988, appeared to provide a
              scientific basis for homeopathic medicine. 

              Benveniste refuses to name the individuals he is
              suing. However, New Scientist has learnt that his
              targets include Georges Charpak and François Jacob.
              Charpak won the physics Nobel in 1992 for his work
              on particle detectors at CERN, the European centre
              for particle physics near Geneva. Jacob, who works
              at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, received the 1965
              prize in medicine for his molecular genetics studies.
              The third defendant is Claude Hennion, a physicist at
              the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in
              Paris. 

              All three researchers made comments presenting
              Benveniste in an unfavourable light in a series of
              articles published by the French newspaper Le Monde
              in January. Benveniste was angered by the articles,
              and is determined to refute any suggestion that he has
              been dishonest. "If you say I am a poor scientist, I
              have no reason to sue," he says. "If you declare I am
              a fraud, I am going to sue." 

              The lawsuit "doesn't frighten me", says Hennion, "but
              it will make me lose a lot of time". Charpak and Jacob
              refused to comment when approached by New
              Scientist. 

              In 1988, Benveniste claimed that water retains a
              "memory" of substances dissolved in it, even after a
              solution is so diluted that not a single molecule of the
              substance remains. This concept underlies the
              practice of homeopathy, in which "activated" water is
              supposed to cure disease. Benveniste's research,
              published in Nature (vol 333, p 816), described
              immune responses mounted by human cells to
              repeatedly diluted solutions of allergens. 

              His work became embroiled in controversy, especially
              after Nature's editor, John Maddox, visited
              Benveniste's laboratory with the conjurer and
              investigator of the paranormal James Randi and
              Walter Stewart, a researcher at the National Institutes
              of Health near Washington DC who has investigated
              several contested experiments. After watching the
              work repeated, Maddox and his colleagues dismissed
              Benveniste's conclusions as a "delusion". They stated
              that his claims were "based chiefly on an extensive
              series of experiments which are statistically
              ill-controlled. 

              Benveniste's immunopharmacology laboratory has
              since been shut down by INSERM, the French
              medical research agency. But he has continued his
              work as the director of the privately funded Digital
              Biology Laboratory, based on the same campus in
              Clamart, south of Paris. In his latest experiments,
              Benveniste claims to have transmitted water
              "memory" over the Internet via e-mail


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Salu2...

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