Word: maddoxisms
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...results of the research, which was directed by Jacques Benveniste, a laboratory head at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. The initial findings were apparently reproduced by scientists in France, Canada, Israel and Italy. Nonetheless, the report was accompanied by an editorial by Editor John Maddox that was almost apologetic. "There are good and particular reasons," he wrote, "why prudent people should, for the time being, suspend judgment." Last week Nature forthrightly rejected the idea of water with a memory and relegated it to the deep freeze, along with other intriguing scientific "discoveries" that have not panned...
...demise was the work of a highly unusual investigative team that the magazine dispatched to Paris. Besides Maddox, the Nature group included James ("the Amazing") Randi, the scourge of clairvoyants, faith healers and spoon benders, and Walter Stewart, a free-lance fraud sleuth at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Their report was merciless: "The hypothesis that water can be imprinted with a memory of past solutes is as unnecessary as it is fanciful." The behavior of the weird water was only a delusion, they concluded, based on flawed experimentation. But the matter did not end there. Nature was still...
...investigation had all the earmarks of an all-out assault on presumed chicanery. "To be frank," said Maddox, "we began by thinking that someone was playing a trick on Benveniste. Our minds were not so much closed as unready to change our whole view of how science is constructed." Notebooks were photographed, researchers videotaped, and vials juggled and secretly coded. Incredibly, the codes were wrapped in tinfoil, sealed in an envelope and stuck on the ceiling so Benveniste and his colleagues could not read them...
...investigators' final report debunking Benveniste's research did not imply that there had been fraud. But it did conclude that the experiments were flawed and that no substantial effort had been made to exclude systematic error, including observer bias. Reported Maddox and his team: "We believe the laboratory has fostered and then cherished a delusion about the interpretation of its data." The report expressed dismay that the salaries of two of Benveniste's colleagues had been paid by a French supplier of homeopathic medicines. The Nature investigators admitted, however, that the same firm had paid their hotel bill...
...results of the investigation infuriated Benveniste. He compared the probe to "Salem witch hunts and McCarthy-like prosecutions." Said he: "It may be that all of us are wrong in good faith. This is no crime but science as usual, and only the future knows." Maddox stuck by his final assessment, as well as by his earlier decisions to publish Benveniste's work and send the investigating team to Paris. But he added, "I'm sorry we didn't find something more interesting...