Homeopathy: The Test - transcript
NARRATOR (NEIL PEARSON): This week Horizon is doing something completely different. For the first time we are conducting our own experiment. We are testing a form of medicine which could transform the world. Should the results be positive this man will have to give us $1m.
JAMES RANDI (Paranormal Investigator): Do the test, prove that it works and win a million dollars.
NARRATOR: But if the results are negative then millions of people, including some of the most famous and influential in the world, may have been wasting their money. The events that would lead to Horizon's million dollar challenge began with Professor Madeleine Ennis, a scientist who may have found the impossible.
PROF. MADELEINE ENNIS (Queen's University, Belfast): I was incredibly surprised and really had great feelings of disbelief.
NARRATOR: Her work concerns a type of medicine which defies the laws of science.
WALTER STEWART (Research Chemist): If Madeleine Ennis turns out to be right it means that science has missed a huge chunk of something.
NARRATOR: She has reawakened one of the most bitter controversies of recent years.
PROF. BOB PARK (University of Maryland): Madeleine Ennis's experiments cannot be right. I mean it's, they're, they're, preposterous.
MADELEINE ENNIS: I have no explanation for what happened. However, this is science. If we knew the answers to the questions we wouldn't bother doing the experiments.
NARRATOR: It's all about something you can find on every high street in Britain: homeopathy. Homeopathy isn't some wacky, fringe belief. It's over 200 years old and is used by millions of people, including Presidents and pop stars. It's even credited with helping David Beckham get over his foot injury and the Royals have been keen users since the days of Queen Victoria, but it's also a scientific puzzle. What makes it so mysterious is its two guiding principles, formulated in the 18th century. The first principle is that to find a cure you look for a substance that actually causes the symptoms you're suffering from. It's the principle that like cures like.
DR PETER FISHER (Homeopath to The Queen): For instance in colds and hay fever something we often use is allium cepa which is onion and of course we all know the effects of chopping an onion, you know the sore streaming eyes, streaming nose, sneezing and so we would use allium cepa, onion, for a cold with similar sorts of features.
NARRATOR: This theory that like cures like led to thousands of different substances being used, some of them truly bizarre.
DR LIONEL MILGROM (Homeopath): In principle you can make a homeopathic remedy out of absolutely anything that's plant.
PETER FISHER: Deadly nightshade.
LIONEL MILGROM: Animal.
PETER FISHER: Snake venom.
LIONEL MILGROM: Mineral.
PETER FISHER: Calcium carbonate, which is of course chalk.
LIONEL MILGROM: Disease product.
PETER FISHER: Tuberculous gland of a cow.
LIONEL MILGROM: Radiation.
NARRATOR: But then homeopaths found that many of these substances were poisonous, so they started to dilute them. This led to the extraordinary second principle of homeopathy: the more you dilute a remedy the more effective it becomes, provided it's done in a special way. The method homeopaths use to this day is called serial dilution. A drop of the original substance, whether it's snake venom or sulphuric acid, is added to 99 drops of waster or alcohol. Then the mixture is violently shaken. Here it's done by machine, but traditionally homeopaths would hit the tube against a hard surface. Either way, homeopaths believe this is a vital stage. It somehow transfers the healing powers from the original substance into the water itself. The result is a mixture diluted 100 times.
LIONEL MILGROM: That will give you what's called a 1C solution, that's one part in 100. You then take that 1C solution and dissolve it in another 99 parts and now you end up with a 2C solution.
NARRATOR: At 2C the medicine is one part in 10,000, but the homeopaths keep diluting and this is where the conflict with science begins. At 6C the medicine is diluted a million million times. This is equivalent to one drop in 20 swimming pools. Another six dilutions gives you 12C. This is equivalent to one drop in the Atlantic Ocean, but even this is not enough for most homeopathic medicines. The typical dilution is 30C, a truly astronomical level of dilution.
BOB PARK: One drop in all of the oceans on Earth would be much more concentrated than that. I would have to go off the planet to make that kind of dilution.
NARRATOR: But homeopaths believe that a drop of this ultra dilute solution placed onto sugar pills can cure you. That's why homeopathy is so controversial because science says that makes no sense whatsoever.
BOB PARK: There is a limit to how much we can dilute any substance. We can only dilute it down to the point that we have one molecule left. The next dilution we probably won't even have that one molecule.
WALTER STEWART: It's possible to go back and count how many molecules are present in a homeopathic dose and the astonishing answer is absolutely none. There's less than a chance in a million, less than a chance in a billion that there's a single molecule.
NARRATOR: A molecule is the smallest piece of a substance you can have, so for something to have any effect at all conventional science says you need one molecule of it at the very least.
WALTER STEWART: Science has through many, many different experiments shown that when a drug works it's always through the way the molecule interacts with the body and, so the discovery that there's no molecules means absolutely there's no effect.
NARRATOR: That's why science and homeopathy have been at war for over 100 years. The homeopaths say that their remedies have healing powers. Science says there's nothing but water. Then one scientist claimed the homeopaths were right after all. Jacques Benveniste was one of France's science superstars. He had a string of discoveries to his name and some believed he was on his way to earning a Nobel Prize.
DR JACQUES BENVENISTE (National Institute for Medical Research): I was considered as, well in French we have a word which says Nobel is nobelisable, which means we can have a Nobel Prize because I started from scratch the whole field of research. I was the head of a very large team, had a lot of money and so I was a very successful person.
NARRATOR: Benveniste was an expert in the field of allergy, in particular he was studying a type of blood cell involved in allergic reactions - the basophil. When basophils come into contact with something you're sensitive to they become activated causing the telltale symptoms. Benveniste had developed a test that could tell if a person was allergic to something or not. He added a kind of dye that only turns inactive basophils blue, so by counting the blue cells he could work out whether there had been a reaction, but then something utterly unexpected started to happen.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: A technician told me one day I don't understand because I have diluted a substance that is activating basophils to a point where it shouldn't work and it still works.
NARRATOR: The researcher had taken the chemical and added water, just like homeopaths do. The result should have been a solution so dilute it had absolutely no effect and yet, bizarrely, there was a reaction. The basophils had been activated. Benveniste knew this shouldn't have been possible.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: I remember saying to this, to her, this is water so it cannot work.
NARRATOR: Benveniste's team was baffled. They needed to find out what was going on, so they carried out hundreds of experiments and soon realised that they'd made an extraordinary discovery. It seemed that when a chemical was diluted to homeopathic levels the result was a special kind of water. It didn't behave like ordinary water, it acted like it still contained the original substance. It was as if the water was remembering the chemical it had once contained, so Benveniste called the phenomenon the 'memory of water'. At last here was scientific evidence that homeopathy could work. Benveniste knew this was a radical suggestion, but there was a way to get his results taken seriously. He had to get them published in a scientific journal.
JACQUES BENVENISTE: A result doesn't exist until it is admitted by the scientific community. It's like, like being a good opera singer but singing in your bathroom. That's fine, but it's not Scala, Milan or the Met, Met or the Opera at Paris, what-have-you.
NARRATOR: So he sent his work to the most prestigious journal in the world, a journal which for over 100 years has reported the greatest of scientific discoveries: Nature.
SIR JOHN MADDOX (Nature Editor 1980-1995): Nature is the place that everyone working in science recognises to be a way of getting publicity of the best kind.
NARRATOR: Benveniste's research ended up with one of the most powerful figures in science, the then Editor of Nature, Sir John Maddox. Maddox knew that the memory of water made no scientific sense, but he couldn't just ignore work from such a respected scientist, so he agonised about what to do. Eventually he reached a decision.
SIR JOHN MADDOX: I said OK, we'll publish your paper if you ;et us come and inspect your lab and he agreed, to my astonishment.
NARRATOR: So in June 1988 Benveniste's research appeared in the pages of Nature. It caused a scientific sensation. Benveniste became a celebrity. His memory of water made news across the world. He seemed to have found the evidence that made homeopathy scientifically credible, but the story wasn't quite over. Benveniste had agreed to let in a team from Nature. It was a decision he would live to regret. Maddox set about assembling his team of investigators and his choices revealed his true suspicions. First, he chose Walter Stewart, a scientist and fraud-buster, but his next choice would really caus