Water. H2O. Most of us take it for granted. But have you every taken a moment to stop and consider just how strange water is? Water is the proverbial thorn in the flesh for the scientific community because it refuses to obey the standard laws of physics.
Lets take a look at some of the more well known idiosyncrasies of water. No other material is commonly found in all its phases of solid, liquid, and gas. As a gas water is one of the lightest know, as a liquid it is much denser that it should be and as a solid it is much lighter than it is expected to be. All other substances contract as they cool off, water expands when it freezes. At 4 degrees C water is at its densest and will expand upon either heating or cooling. Water also defies the law of gravity by what is called capillary action. If you place a straw or small tube into a glass of water it will climb up into the tube. The smaller the tube the higher the water will climb.
One of the reasons water behaves so strangely is caused by the way the molecules bond together. This is called hydrogen bonding and most chemical reactions in our body involve hydrogen bonding at some point or other.
Water molecules are polarized. Meaning that one part of the molecule is more positively charged than another. In the case of water the ends are more positive than the centre. Because of the is the molecules act like little magnets and stack in an orderly fashion but the water is still liquid because the hydrogen bonds can easily be broken an reformed. Water can be literally both a liquid and a solid at the same time.
Probably the most controversial thing about water is the fact that it seems to have memory. Many experiments have been done that point in this direction. We will take a look at a few of the more fascinating ones.
Jacques Benveniste was a French immunologist. In 1979 he published a well-known paper on the structure of platelet-activating factor and its relationship with histamine.
Benveniste found that high dilutions of antibodies produced exactly the same reaction as the antibody. Biologists were puzzled by Benveniste’s results, as only molecules of water, and no molecules of the original antibody, remained in these high dilutions. Benveniste concluded that the configuration of molecules in water was capable of storing biological information; a journalist coined the term water memory for this hypothesis.
Luc Montagnier tells another story that began 10 years ago when he discovered the strange behaviour of a small bacterium, Mycoplasm pirum, a frequent companion to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection; and like the HIV, has special affinity for the human lymphocytes (white blood cells). He was trying to separate the bacterium of about 300 nm from the virus particles of about 120 nm using filters of pore size 100 nm and 20 nm, starting with pure cultures of the bacterium on lymphocytes.
The filtrate (solution that went through the filter) was sterile, and no bacterium grew in a rich culture medium that would normally support its growth. Furthermore, polymerase chain reactions (PCR) failed to detect any DNA in the filtrate.
But, to Montagnier’s surprise, when the filtrate was incubated with lymphocytes that were not infected with Mycoplasm (according to the most stringent tests), the bacterium was regularly recovered.
So, was there some information in the filtrate responsible for directing the synthesis of the bacterium? That marked the beginning of a long series of investigations on how DNA behaves in water, which led to the discovery that the M. pirum DNA was emitting low frequency electromagnetic waves in some diluted solutions of the filtrate in water, and this property of M. pirum DNA was soon extended to other bacterial and viral DNA.
The instrument used to detect the electromagnetic (EM) signals consists of a solenoid (a coil of wire) that detects the magnetic component of the waves produced by the DNA solution in a plastic tube as it induces an electric current in the wire. This current is amplified and analysed in a laptop computer using special software, and the resultant signals plotted out on the computer screen.
In summary, ultra-low frequency (500 – 3000 Hz) electromagnetic (EM) signals were detected in certain dilutions of the filtrate from cultures of micro-organisms (virus, bacteria) or from the plasma of humans infected with the same agents. The same results were obtained from the bacteria’s extracted DNA.
In another experiment, a fragment of HIV DNA was used for generating EM signals. This fragment was amplified by PCR, which is basically a method of making many copies of a single strand of DNA. Dilutions, like those used to make homeopathic tinctures, were made of the DNA and EM signals were detected in the dilutions.
One of the diluted solutions, was placed in a container shielded by 1 mm thick mu-metal (an alloy that absorbs EM waves). Close to it, another tube containing pure water was placed. The water content of each tube had been filtered through 450 nm and 20 nm filters and diluted from 10-2 to 10-15. A copper solenoid was placed around the tubes and they were exposed to a low intensity electric current oscillating at 7 Hz to produce a field similar to the earth’s Shumann resonance (the Shumann resonate is the oscillations of the earth’s magnetic field). The magnetic field was maintained for 18 hours at room temperature. EM signals were then recorded from each tube. At that point, the tube containing pure water also emitted EM. This result shows that the EM signals carried by the nanostructures in the water originating from the DNA had been transmitted to the pure water in 18 hours. No such transfer of EM signals was achieved when the time of exposure was less than 16 to 18 hours, or when the coil was absent, or when the generator of magnetic field was turned off, or the frequency of excitation was less than 7 Hz, or when DNA was absent in the ‘donor’ tube.
Now for the most crucial test: could the EM signals transmitted to the pure water that never had DNA in it provide sufficient information to recreate the DNA sequence? To test this, all the ingredients necessary for synthesizing the DNA by the polymerase chain reaction – nucleotides, primers, polymerase enzyme – were added to the tube with the pure water that had gained the EM signal. The amplification was done under ordinary conditions, and the DNA produced was then run through an agarose gel electrophoresis.
A DNA band of the expected size (104 bp) was found. It was 98 percent identical to the sequence of DNA from which the EM signals originated (only 2 out of 104 basepairs were different).
The experiment was highly reproducible, 12 out of 12 times; and was also repeated with another DNA sequence from the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, the agent of Lyme disease.
This suggests an explanation for Montagnier’s original observation made ten years ago that the bacterium could be reconstituted from a sterile filtrate incubated with human lymphocytes. The EM signals of all the bacterium’s DNA were in the sterile filtrate. The nanostructures induced by M. pirum DNA in the filtrate carried information representing different segments of its genomic DNA. Each nanostructure, when in contact with the human lymphocytes, directs the synthesis of the corresponding DNA by the DNA polymerases in the cell. There is then a certain probability that each piece of DNA recombines within the cell to reconstruct the whole DNA genome of Mycoplasm. From there, the synthesis of the rest of the bacterium – membrane lipids, ribosomes, and proteins – could take place, thanks to the host cells. One single reconstituted Mycoplasm is sufficient to infect the lymphocytes.
There is a theory for how this may work, but it is far too much to get into in this article and there are still many unknowns. However, there is a saying that all the things that man invents existed first in nature. And in all reality why is the idea that water can store information any more startling than the idea that a computer can. So the question now becomes, how does a computer store information.
A computer chip is made of a silicon crystal. And information is stored on it in the form of positive and negative charges in the crystal. Water is also a crystal, and also stores positive and negative charges in its crystals. So, is the glass of water you just drank capable of storing information? The answer is yours to discover.