[extropy-chat] FWD (SK) Paper refuting Benveniste's digital biological signals

[Dirk Bruere]

On 2/16/06, Terry W. Colvin <fortean1 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
> Jacques Benveniste (died 2004) was a researcher who produced
>
> controversial results said to be supportive of homeopathy.  In recent
> years he promoted the idea the biological signals could be converted to
> digital form and transmitted electronically.  His web site describing
> these efforts is still up, though it appears to be inactive:
> http://www.digibio.com/
>
> Here is the abstract of a paper of his reporting this type of effect:
>
> Med Hypotheses. 2000 Jan;54(1):33-9
>
> Activation of human neutrophils by electronically transmitted
> phorbol-myristate acetate.
>
> Thomas Y, Schiff M, Belkadi L, Jurgens P, Kahhak L, Benveniste J.
>
> Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale, (INSERM)
> U200, and Digital Biology Laboratory, Clamart, France.
> ythomas at ens.-fcl.fr
>
> We report the transfer of the activity of
> 4-phorbol-12-beta-myristate-13-acetate (PMA) by electronic means.
> Neutrophils were placed at 37 degrees C on one coil attached to an
> oscillator, while PMA was placed on another coil at room temperature.
> The oscillator was then turned on for 15 min, after which cells were
> usually further incubated for up to 45 min at 37 degrees C before
> measurement of reactive oxygen metabolites (ROMs) production. In 20
> blind experiments, PMA thus 'transmitted' induced ROM production. ROM
> were not induced when: (1) PMA vehicle or 4-alpha-phorbol
> 12,13-didecanoate (an inactive PMA analogue) were transmitted; (2) the
> oscillator was switched off; (3) superoxide dismutase or protein kinase
> C inhibitors were added to cells before transmission. These results
> suggest that PMA molecules emit signals that can be transferred to
> neutrophils by artificial physical means in a manner that seems specific
> to the source molecules.
>
>
> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10790721&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum
>
> .


Seems he graduated to a moderately wellknown area of fringe scitech -
Psionic machines.
The peculiar things is that they *seem* to work for some people some of the
time. I've made a lot of money using them, for example, but like all Psi
phenomena they are almost impossible to pin down in a lab setting. See
Hieronymus Machine for comparison.
http://www.cheniere.org/books/excalibur/typical_hieronymus_detector.htm

Dirk
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060216/1d904052/attachment.html>