Luc Montagnier, Nobel Laureate and French virologist, presented a new method for detecting viral infections that bore close parallels to the basic tenets of homeopathy at a prestigious international conference.
Montagnier told the conference last week that solutions containing the DNA of pathogenic bacteria and viruses, including HIV, “could emit low frequency radio waves” that induced surrounding water molecules to become arranged into “nanostructures”. These water molecules, he said, could also emit radio waves.
He suggested water could retain such properties even after the original solutions were massively diluted, to the point where the original DNA had effectively vanished. In this way, he suggested, water could retain the “memory” of substances with which it had been in contact — and doctors could use the emissions to detect disease.
To a lay person this may sound tenuous. For a scientist it is highly provocative in its similarity to the principles said to underpin homeopathy.
Homeopathic medicines work on the principle that a toxic substance taken in minute amounts will cure the same symptoms that it would cause if it were taken in large amounts.
Montagnier’s claims come at a particularly sensitive time, with the British Medical Association last week calling for the National Health Service to stop spending pound stg. 4 million ($7.2m) a year on homeopathy.
The growing concern of doctors is linked to homeopathy’s rising popularity. Users of homeopathy include the Queen and David Beckham.
Montagnier was awarded the Nobel prize in 2008 for research carried out in the 1980s that confirmed the link between HIV and AIDS. The breakthrough opened the way to new treatments that have extended the lives of millions of people.
Cristal Sumner, of the British Homeopathic Association, said Montagnier’s work gave homeopathy “a true scientific ethos”.
Source:
The Australian, The Sunday Times
© 2010 Myra Nissen.
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