Does Water Have Memory?

I won't address this question today. I'll simply linkfarm it.

For a quick overview of the controversy about "water memory" start here.

If you want to see the paper in NATURE that triggered the 1988 controversy on this point, you'll need to log in to their archive.

The leader of the team that researched and prepared that 1988 paper was Jacques Benveniste. Despite the storm of criticism, despite the loss of his job and funding, Benveniste remains convinced the results were right. See a letter he wrote in 2003.

Water memory is one aspect of the claims made for homeopathic medicine. Homeopathic solutions are typically so thoroughly diluted that no trace of the original foreign element is left at the end of the process, and the patient ends up with just water. Anything more to the treatment than water can provide must come about because the history of a particular sample of water has trace effects.

The claims of homeopathy are discussed, in typically severe style, in The Skeptics Dictionary, although the treatment of the NATURE article and the controversy thereafter is rather buried in the midst of that material.

The two issues are separate, though. One can logically suspect that water has some sort of memory while still acknowledging the studies that show that "homeopathic cures" are explicable as placebo effects. Water could have memory but not have the kind of medically convenient memory homeopathy presumes!

Professor Madeleine Ennis is skeptical about homeopathy, but says: "Despite my reservations" the results of her own experiments "compel me to suspend my disbelief and to start searching for a rational explanation for our findings." So I have read in The Guardian.

Louis Rey, a Swiss chemist, seems to have come at the issue of water memory through a route distinct from any of those before him. He has used thermo-luminescence to study solids and learn about the patterns of hydrogen bonds.

Rey's results have been challenged, too. Scientists need to continue thrashing this out. I think there is something important at the bottom of it all.

More on Roman Polanski

The emerging Swiss/US relationship is intriguing.

Somebody has apparently decided, for example, that an isolated spot in the Alps might be ideal for some of the prisoners now kept at Gitmo. Thus we get news stories like this.

There's also the taxation issue. Perhaps Switzerland wants to earn back the prerogative of being a tax-evasion haven by making clear that it is not a sex-crimes haven. There surely is more to the timing of Polanski's arrest than some Javert-like perseverance on the part of Californian investigators.

Switzerland's reputation as a tax haven has taken some hits lately. Or (to put the point positively) its repute as a member of the family of nations willing to co-operate with other nations in going after tax cheats has improved.

Indeed, it was only Friday, September 25, that the OECD promoted Switzerland from the gray to the "white list" of mutually co-operative countries. See here.

Intriguingly, it was only one day later that Roman Polanski tried to enter the country of Switzerland to accept an award and found himself under arrest on sex crime charges dating back to the 1970s.

Is there a connection between the two events other than geography? Consider, whilst pondering this, that the government of the US has a good reason to want to be friends with Switzerland, quite aside from tax revenue. Those Guantanamo prisoners have to go somewhere.

In a related development, the largest Swiss bank, UBS, especially wants to get back into the good graces of the United States after a run-in with the IRS: here.

Could UBS have been part of a back channel deal for Polanski?

None of this makes Polanski any less of a criminal sleazebag than he would be anyway. But it does add another dimension to the proceedings.

Roman Polanski

I'm rather late to the fair on the Roman Polanski story. Let me, though, say this: Polanski should do some time. Behind the reluctance to agree with that in some quarters is an abominable quasi Nietzschean bunch of crap about how great artists are Ubermensch so they don't have to obey the rules of the rest of society, and that needs a rebuke.

Look at it another way. Polanski could have lived out his whole life in France, dying some day of natural causes free from any US/Californian prosecution. Is France itself a prison cell??? Hardly! It has lots of room, it has Paris, plus skier friendly mountains, some of the world's most beautiful beaches, and should he get tired of all of that ... its own Disneyland even! Not much like where he is going to be living.

So why did he not stay in France? Because he doesn't really think of himself as a fugutive, so he sees no reason why he shouldn't travel freely to accept prizes. In that sense, he is being punished not only for a long-ago horrid crime but for a very recent instance of reality-denial.

The only thing sad here is that his arrest wasn't captured on video by Dateline. This would be a great episode of Chris Hanson's "To Catch a Predator."

"Can I come in, Swiss Miss?"

[Female voice from inside] ; "Oh yes, pour yourself a lemonade, I'll be out in a minute."