Word: biologist
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Nobel laureate Brian Josephson was incensed. He had just read a column by physicist Robert Park poking fun at the work of a French biologist who maintains that the benefits of homeopathic medicine can be transmitted electronically. Josephson, who since winning the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics has developed an interest in fringe sciences, fired off an e-mail challenge to Park, who promptly responded. Their exchange could lead to the first rigorous test of one of the world's most widely practiced alternative therapies...
...they possibly do any good? Advocates suggest that during the dilution process, the characteristics of the active substance are transferred to the water molecules. Indeed, the French biologist, Jacques Benveniste, claimed in a 1988 report to Nature that he had proof that a homeopathic solution without a single molecule of a biologically active substance was still active. Attempts to reproduce his results were unsuccessful...
...challenge, Josephson suggested a randomized double-blind test. Park, a longtime critic of homeopathy, was delighted to accept and is now close to agreeing with Josephson on a protocol. In one proposal, samples of water, some of which have been given the Benveniste treatment, would be examined by the biologist himself, who would then attempt to identify which, if any, had been rendered homeopathic. Yet Benveniste seems hesitant. Some "variables," as he puts it, including financing, remain to be discussed...
...What a molecular biologist does in a test tube, we try to do in whole living people," said Weissleder...
...What a molecular biologist does in a test tube, we try to do in whole living people," said Weissleder...