The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is potentially wading into hot water next month when it hosts a meeting set up by Nobelist Luc Montagnier to discuss his controversial research on what has become known as “the memory of water.” The afternoon at the agency’s Paris headquarters will feature talks about the virologist’s widely ridiculed idea that water can carry information via an electromagnetic imprint from DNA and other molecules.
The meeting has so far raised little public opposition from researchers, but the announcement on UNESCO’s website acknowledges its controversial nature, saying:
The promoters of this conference are aware of the critical reactions aroused by this work in parts of the scientific community, so they wish to communicate their results with the utmost rigor. The aim is to foster a broad and multidisciplinary discussion. These data seem particularly important because they further enrich the immense achievements of molecular biology. They also suggest the development of new modes of transmission of genetic messages (transmission, transduction, teleportation, etc.).
Montagnier says the issue is actually getting less controversial as fresh evidence for his claims is coming in. “More scientists are becoming convinced by the data,” he says.
At least one blogger is taking offense, however: “Shame on @UNESCO for hosting this absurd pseudoscience conference about Montagnier’s nonsense,” tweeted Andy Lewis, who hosts the blog The Quackometer, last week. “This is classic pathological science—dredging around in the noise of irreproducible experiments by practitioners whose expertise is not in these fields in order to support hypotheses that fly in the face of well-established scientific principles,” Lewis writes in an e-mail to ScienceInsider.
Montagnier, 82, who shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2008 for the discovery of HIV, stunned many fellow scientists about 5 years ago with claims that DNA emits weak electromagnetic waves that cause structural changes in water that persist even in extremely high dilutions. Montagnier considers himself an intellectual heir to the controversial French scientist Jacques Benveniste, who claimed in a 1988 Nature paper that water can retain “memories” of compounds even when diluted at a very high level—a claim that caused a sensation in the press and was taken as support of homeopathy by its proponents, but that other scientists weren’t able to replicate. (1)
One blogger! Wow!
We are talking about some serious opposition here.
Unfortunately it seems that no matter what credentials you have, if you discuss about something the “people” find absurd, then we will laugh at you.
Because science is nothing special.
Science is just the new religion.
And its followers decide on its path.
What the majorities find correct is based on assumptions and axioms.
What science finds true is based on assumptions and axioms as well.
Religion on the other hand is counter-intuitive. For the majorities.
Search your feelings.
Look for that “illogical” heart inside you.
Listen to it’s irrational voice…
We once knew many things.
Now we have forgotten them.
Just look into the water…
