13 Things That Don't Make Sense (25 page)

One thing we do know is that water is a particularly strange liquid. A stone’s throw from the brown ooze of the River Thames,
across from the Houses of Parliament, is the office of a man who could be considered the world expert on water. Martin Chaplin,
a professor at London’s South Bank University, has dedicated his career to studying the wet stuff and its scientific properties.
How many anomalies does it show? At least sixty-four, he says.

Most of that weirdness comes from the weak bonds that exist between water molecules. The oxygen atom in H
₂
O has a couple of electrons that are not engaged in bonding to the hydrogen atoms. Their negative charges are, however, attracted
to the positive charge in the hydrogen atoms of other water molecules.

Though these bonds, known as hydrogen bonds, are weak—at room temperature they are constantly being broken and re-formed as
the molecules slide around each other—they are responsible for many of water’s strange properties. In fact, they are responsible
for your existence; water’s hydrogen bonds are what makes Earth habitable for humans. The hydrogen bonds make water the only
liquid that expands on freezing, for example. That means ice doesn’t sink to the bottom of an ocean; if water were like every
other liquid in this regard, the planet’s oceans would be frozen solid, with only the top layer melted by sunlight. Complex
life would be untenable.

Water’s properties also lie more directly behind the phenomenon we call
life.
When one of the
Nature
journals asked Chaplin to write a review of water’s role in biology, he started it with a rather provocative statement. “It
is surely time,” he said, “for water to take up its rightful position as the most important and active of all biological molecules.”

Chaplin is the campaign coordinator, the chief of staff, for the recognition of water’s role in our world. His review article
reads like a political address. Studying other, “glitzier” biomolecules might be fashionable, but water is the key to all
of them, he says. When the proteins, the workhorses of your body, fold up to take on particular shapes and roles, water, thanks
to the electrostatic attractions its hydrogen bonds provide, is a necessary part of the process. And then, when a protein
has finished forming, water is the protein’s lubricant, its hydrogen bonds allowing the protein to flex as it goes about its
business. Water is as essential to a protein as the amino acids that make up the protein chain.

In DNA, water molecules form electrostatic links with the base pairs; the orientation of the water molecules varies with the
bases and the sequence they are in. It is this pattern of water molecules, and its resulting electric field, that allows proteins
(with their own water) to approach and bond with the correct base pairs—and to do it quickly and accurately. Thus water is
essential to processing the information contained in the DNA; it is at the center of the phenomenon of life. “Liquid water
is not a ‘bit player’ in the theater of life—it’s the headline act,” Chaplin says. “Water can function as individual isolated
molecules, small clusters, much larger networks or as liquid phases that can have different ‘personalities.’ ”

In 1998, for instance, Chaplin was working out how the attractions between the molecules would cause water molecules to form
groups. His calculations showed that water could well exist in 280-molecule clusters that took the shape of a twenty-sided
solid where every face is an equilateral triangle. We know this shape as an icosahedron. Buckminster Fuller took it as the
basis for his geodesic designs, but we also see it in nature; many viruses adopt the shape because it is the most efficient
way to pack their proteins.

Interestingly, the shape has an ancient connection with water. The Greek philosopher Plato identified five “perfect solids,”
which he associated with elements and aspects of the universe. The cube he called Earth; the tetrahedron, Fire; the octahedron,
Air; the dodecahedron, the Cosmos. Water, to Plato, was the icosahedron. Which makes it all the more surprising that in 2001,
three years after Chaplin first suggested water might take this form, a group of German researchers saw the shape in a tiny
drop of water around a millionth of a millimeter across.

The icosahedron is just one of many ways in which water molecules can cluster; there are pentamers, octomers, decamers, ice-seven,
and hexagonal ice . . . and that is only one aspect of the structure in water. In 2004 Tatsuhiko Kawamoto and his colleagues
published a paper in the
Journal of Chemical Physics
showing that as you squeeze or cool a body of water, it becomes broken up into distinct beads, each of which has characteristics
slightly different from surrounding beads. It’s almost like a pebbled beach; from a distance the shore looks smooth and continuous,
but when you jump off the promenade, you find yourself walking on stones of varied color, roughness, shape, hardness, and
size. The origin of all these differences in water, Kawamoto found, was in the hydrogen bonds that weakly link water molecules
to each other. Each of these bonds responds in a different way to pressure; just as pebbles get eroded at different rates
and in different ways by the waves crashing on a shore, the hydrogen bonds in a body of water will respond individually. The
result is a rich mess of water “aggregates.”

Further evidence of the heterogeneous nature of water came in 2004, when scientists led by the Stanford physical chemist Anders
Nilsson published a paper in
Science
showing that water could exist in chains and rings. Water is far more interesting than just a sea of identical molecules of
H2O. In fact, it seems naive, in the light of the evidence that research has thrown up, to think of water as composed of just
plain water molecules.

NOT
that any of this is a proof for homeopathy. Most scientists are reluctant to get involved with explaining homeopathy via the
structure of water. The field has been tainted since Benveniste’s announcement and subsequent fall from grace. One might say
he is both the Pons and the Fleischmann of homeopathy, and nobody wants to share his fate. In fact, the parallel goes farther,
because any ideas people have about how the complexities of water might explain the claims of homeopathy are as unsatisfying
as the theories that attempt to explain cold fusion.

Nevertheless, there have been attempts to explain how homeopathy might work. Perhaps the best offering so far came in a paper
published in
Materials Research Innovations
in 2005. At first glance, the four authors certainly make an impressive lineup: Rustum Roy, the founding director of the Pennsylvania
State University’s Materials Research Laboratory; M. Richard Hoover, an assistant professor also at PSU; William Tiller, a
former department chair of materials at Stanford University; and Iris Bell, a professor of medicine, psychiatry, family and
community medicine, and public health at the University of Arizona.

Most of the paper is a literature review. It points out that the structure of a material, not its composition, controls its
properties. The distinction between the different forms of carbon—graphite is a soft lubricant while diamond a hard solid—makes
this point rather conveniently. In water, many structures exist (they cite Martin Chaplin’s observations that water has been
seen to exist in clusters composed of anywhere from 2 to 280 molecules), suggesting the potential for many differing properties
to emerge within one body of liquid. The authors point out that of all liquids and solids, water moves between its different
structures with the most ease.

Perhaps the most compelling point in the paper, though, is the discussion of
epitaxy
. Epitaxy is a well-known phenomenon in which structural information is transferred from one material to another without the
transfer of material or the involvement of chemical reactions. The way some wafers of silicon are grown in the semiconductor
industry offers an example. Place a solid crystal—often a lump of gallium arsenide, but it could be glass or ceramic—in a
solution of silicon dissolved in liquid gallium. By controlling the temperature conditions, you can make the silicon slowly
come out of solution and deposit its atoms on top of the crystal. The way it grows—that is, where its atoms fall and how the
lattice structure forms as each atom comes out of solution—is determined by the structure of the outer layers of the original
substrate crystal. The spacing of the substrate’s atoms and the orientation of its lattice structure will, effectively, dictate
how the new silicon crystal forms. This process is known as
liquid phase epitaxy
, but deposition from vapor, or even a beam of vaporized material, is also widely used in semiconductor manufacturing. If
you have a computer, a pacemaker, or a high-tech toaster, the chances are that at least one of its components was made using
epitaxy.

Rustum Roy and his colleagues make the point that the original material of a homeopathic remedy placed in water might have
a similar epitaxial effect on the water (or water plus ethanol) of a homeopathic dilution, altering its structure. That altered
structure could then be passed on as the solution is further diluted—especially with succussion. The “imprinting” of structure,
they suggest, might be made possible by the high pressures created in the succussion process. Since it is structure, not composition,
that determines properties, the absence of molecules of the original remedy in the final solution is thus immaterial.

As far as it goes, the array of possible mechanisms for the “memory of water” is intriguing. It is unfortunate, then, that
Roy and his coauthors didn’t refrain from examining the effects of electromagnetic fields and human intention, which they
refer to as “subtle energies,” on water when they wrote their paper; it rather has the effect of breaking their spell.

The team of researchers involved in putting this paper together might have impressive academic backgrounds, but there are
also reasons to take what they say with a little pinch of salt. With the exception of M. Richard Hoover, they have reasons,
besides the open-mindedness of a scientific approach, to want homeopathy taken seriously.

Roy, for example, has a long list of emeritus professorships, and an even longer list of publications in respected journals.
He received a research award from the emperor of Japan; he even had a mineral—Rustumite—named after him. On the down side,
though, Roy associates professionally with Deepak Chopra, whose claims for the healing quantum properties of water are questionable,
to say the least. Roy advocates using silver as an antibiotic, something that has repeatedly separated fools and their money—including
those selling the silver, who have been fined by the FDA for promoting and profiting from a treatment that can result in actual
bodily harm. He also thinks—and advocates in this paper—that the conscious will of a healer, such as a Chinese Qigong grand
master, can change the structure of water. Tiller, for his part, has published claims that weak magnetic fields can alter
biological materials and the pH of water, and that human intention can also change pH, affect electrical circuits, and alter
the properties of space. Iris Bell is an enthusiastic advocate of holistic and alternative medical practice—a lesser problem,
but still worth noting.

Despite such damning caveats, the paper does make some truly interesting and potentially important points, offering hints
as to where further research might clarify our understanding of the mechanisms that could lie behind homeopathy. The question
is, will anyone want to pursue them? Is homeopathy worth our attention?

Evidently, millions of people think so, judging by the uptake of homeopathy. There is also the fact that it is absorbing public
money to consider. Some scientists, Richard Dawkins, for example, are vociferously up in arms about the idea that their taxes
are funding this “quackery.” Are they right to be outraged? Answering that depends on the answer to another question: does
homeopathy work or not? If only the answer were as simple as the question.

ON
August 27, 2005, the
Lancet
announced the “End of Homeopathy.” Its editorial article said homeopathy could no longer make any claims of efficacy, and
that doctors “need to be bold and honest with their patients about homeopathy’s lack of benefits.” The reason for the declaration
was an article published in the same issue, a meta-analysis of homeopathy led by Aijing Shang of the University of Bern and
published to great fanfare. It pronounced homeopathy “no better than placebo.” Since we have already discovered that meta-analyses
of placebo trials have declared the placebo effect quite possibly a myth, that perhaps doesn’t seem so ground-shaking. But,
for Shang and his team, the study provided a killer blow: homeopathy was dead.

Until about a week later, that is, when the letters started coming in.

Although the authors had claimed their analysis put the final nail in the coffin of homeopathy, some scientists—not just the
friends of homeopathy, it has to be said—were appalled that the
Lancet
had published such a “flawed” study. Klaus Linde and Wayne Jonas had published a very similar analysis of the medical literature
about homeopathy in 1997—also in the
Lancet
—and felt compelled to complain. “We agree that homeopathy is highly implausible and that the evidence from placebo-controlled
trials is not robust,” they said. “However, there are major problems with the way Shang and colleagues presented and discussed
their results, as well as how the
Lancet
reviewed and interpreted this study.”

For a start, they pointed out, Shang’s group did not follow the accepted guidelines for reporting meta-analyses. They left
out details of the trials they examined, and excluded details of the trials they had decided to leave out of the review. In
a paper that came to such a strong and definite conclusion, such lack of detail was “unacceptable,” Linde and Jonas said.
By its own standards, declared in 1999, the
Lancet
should have refused to publish the study.