Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

A lack of rigour, particularly a lack of blinding, can seriously bias any scientific result even for the most honest and well-intentioned scientist. Imagine the following scenario: a scientist has staked his reputation on the hypothesis that men have superior spatial awareness and motor skills, and he thinks he can demonstrate that this is the case by inviting men and women to draw freehand circles and then comparing the quality of their drawings. The experiment begins — the men and women draw their circles, they write their names at the top of the papers, the drawings are collected by an assistant and handed to the scientist, who judges the circles by eye and gives each one marks out of ten. However, because he can see the names of the artists at the top of each drawing, he might be tempted subconsciously to mark the men’s circles more generously. Consequently, regardless of the truth, it is more likely that the resulting data would support his hypothesis that men are better than women at drawing circles. By contrast, if the experiment were to be repeated and the artists were given numbers to disguise their gender temporarily, then the prejudiced scientist becomes blinded and is more likely to give a fairer assessment of each circle. The new result is likely to be more reliable.

In the Benveniste case, the problem was that Davenas was unblinded and prejudiced in favour of homeopathy, and this combination of factors could have biased her results. In particular, Davenas’s experiments required her to judge whether a homeopathic preparation caused blood cells to exhibit an allergic reaction, which is not a clear-cut decision, even when the cells are viewed through a microscope. Indeed, judging the extent of a cell’s allergic reaction is similar to examining a circle’s roundness: both are equally prone to personal interpretation and bias.

For example, Davenas would have come across many borderline cases — has the cell undergone an allergic reaction or not? There might have been a subconscious temptation to judge such borderline cells as exhibiting allergic reactions if she knew that they had been treated homeopathically. Or she might have been subconsciously tempted to give the opposite judgement if she knew that they had been treated with plain water. However, by asking Davenas to repeat the experiment without any labels on the test tubes, the Nature investigators ensured that she was blind and unbiased in her decisions; whereupon the homeopathic solutions and water led to similar results. A fair test had shown that the homeopathic solutions had no impact on the basophil cells.

While Benveniste readily accepted some elements of the criticism, he steadfastly defended the core of his research and argued that the results that he had accumulated over the course of two years could not be negated by what the Nature team had observed in just a few days. He explained that the mistakes that had been witnessed by Maddox, Randi and Stewart were caused by the unusual circumstances, namely that his team was working under intense pressure and in the media spotlight.

Benveniste remained convinced that his work would ultimately be recognized with a Nobel Prize, but instead he was merely rewarded with a satirical award known as the Ig Nobel Prize. In fact, he won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1991 and then another one in 1998, making him the first scientist to win two Ig Nobels. As the years passed, Benveniste saw his scientific reputation decline in the press and among his peers, which led him to complain that he was being victimized. He even compared himself to Galileo, because they had both been subjected to attacks when they dared to speak out against the establishment. This was a flawed comparison for two major reasons. First, Galileo was attacked largely by the religious establishment, rather than by his scientific peers. Second, Galileo was in a different class to Benveniste — after all, Galileo’s observations stood up to scrutiny and his experimental results were replicated by others.

Benveniste struggled to retain his academic post as a result of the Nature debacle, but he was determined not to abandon his research, so he established a company called DigiBio to nurture and promote his ideas. Among their wilder pronouncements, researchers at DigiBio stated that not only could water hold a memory of what it had previously contained, but that this memory could also be digitized, transmitted via email and reintroduced into another sample of water, which in turn could affect basophil cells. Although Benveniste died in 2004, DigiBio has continued its campaign to have his ideas taken seriously. Its website proclaims: