(Also Pitkanen 57.Pdf) => Doc Pdf URL-Doc URL-Pdf
archived as
(also …Pitkanen_57.pdf) =>doc pdf URL-doc URL-pdf
more from Matti Pitkänen is on the /Pitkanen.htm page at doc pdf URL
note: because important websites are frequently "here today but gone tomorrow", the following was archived from on 01/14/2011. This is NOT an attempt to divert readers from the aforementioned website. Indeed, the reader should only read this back-up copy if the updated original cannot be found at the original author's site.
does Water represent Genetic Code?
Matti Pitkänen/ January 12, 2011
Postal address:
Köydenpunojankatu 2 D 11
10940, Hanko, Finland
E-mail:
URL-address:
(former address:)
"Blog" forum:
======
Editorial: "Why we have to teleport disbelief"
As the old saying goes, it's good to have an open mind. Bt not so open that your brains fall out.
This week we report claims about the way that DNA behaves that are so astonishing that many minds have already snapped shut.
The experiments (see "Scorn over claim of Teleported DNA" below) make 3 claims that will stretch most people's credulity. (1) Under certain conditions, DNA can project copies of itself onto electromagnetic waves. (2) These same waves can be picked up by pure water and -- through quantum effects -- create a "nanostructure" in the shape of the original DNA. And (3) if enzymes which replicate DNA are present in a "receiving" solution, they can recreate the original DNA from the teleported "nanostructure" as if DNA was really there.
This scenario inevitably conjures up echoes of the "water memory" experiments in 1988 by the late Jacques Benveniste (New Scientist, July 14, 1988, p 39). Back then, Benveniste reported that antibodies could leave a ghostly "memory" in water that made the water behave as if the antibodies were still there, even in solutions so dilute that no antibody molecules were left. Eventuallyhis findings were dismissed, as was he.
The main researcher behind the new DNA experiments is a recent Nobel prizewinner -- Luc Montagnier. But Science should be no respecter of persons. The researchers we contacted for comment rightly said his results should be ignored unless and until they have been repeated by independent groups. Nobel laureates are not immune from eccentric beliefs. Others believe in telepathy, have communed with fluorescent raccoons, and championed vitamin C as a cure for cancer.
There is also, not surprisingly, suspicion that Montagnier has been misled by contamination. It is a problem that has so far stymied the hunt for Jurassic DNA and for traces of life in Martian meteorites. Many other experiments have been wrecked by contamination with "impostor" cells.
Given such reasons for doubt and the hard-to-believe explanations being put forward to account for the claimed effects, should we be reporting Montagnier's work at all? We decided to go ahead because any bona fide experimental result is worthy of scrutiny and the claims are nothing if not interesting.
What's more, the latest paper follows earlier work by Montagnier. Given the remarkable implications of the claims and the relative simplicity of the experiments, other groups will almost certainly take a look and attempt to repeat Montagnier's results. As one researcher told us: "20 labs could do this within 3 months. So we'll soon know whether it's real."
Like many of the researchers we contacted for comment, we won't believe it till someone repeats it. But we do think they should try. As with cold fusion in 1989, heretical findings with far-reaching implications are sometimes worth investigating even if the chances that there is something to it all are remote. Back then, it was harnessing the power of the Sun in a test tube. In this case, our picture of infection might need a fundamental overhaul.
It shouldn't take long to find out whether DNA teleportation is mad or miraculous. Either way, it's important to find out.
======
Scorn over claim of Teleported DNA
by Andy Coghlan
New Scientist / January 12, 2011
A Nobel prizewinner is reporting that DNA can be generated from its teleported "quantum imprint".
A storm of skepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which -- if confirmed -- would shake the foundations of several fields of Science. "If the results are correct," says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimersof the University of Sydney, Australia, "these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern Chemistry."
Luc Montagnier (who shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that HIV causes AIDS) says he has evidence that DNA can send spooky electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids. If that wasn't heretical enough, he also suggests that enzymes can mistake the ghostly imprints for real DNA and faithfully copy them to produce the real thing. In effect, this would amount to a kind of quantum teleportation of the DNA.
Many researchers contacted for comment by New Scientist reacted with disbelief. Gary Schuster (who studies DNA conductance effects at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta) compared it to "pathological science". Jacqueline Barton (who does similar work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena) was equally skeptical. "There aren't a lot of data given and I don't buy the explanation," she says. One blogger has suggested Montagnier should be awarded an IgNobel prize.
Yet the results can't be dismissed out of hand. "The experimental methods used appear comprehensive," says Reimers. So what have Montagnier and his team actually found?
Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. 2 adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth's natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long. The second tube contained pure water.
After 16-to-18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) -- a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes even though one should have contained just water (see diagram).
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA -- whose concentration has not been revealed -- had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle, it was diluted 10-fold and "ghost" DNA was only recovered after between 7 and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.
How could it leave its mark? (Image: Pasieka/SPL)
Physicists in Montagnier's team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects. And because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which "sent" the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).
"The biological experiments do seem intriguing and I wouldn't dismiss them," says Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada who last year demonstrated that quantum effects occur in plants. Yet according to Klaus Gerwert who studies interactions between water and biomolecules at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany: "It is hard to understand how the information can be stored within water over a timescale longer than picoseconds."
"The structure would be destroyed instantly," agrees Felix Franks, a retired academic chemist in London who has studied water for many years. Franks was involved as a peer reviewer in the debunking of a controversial study in 1988 which claimed that water had a memory (see "How 'ghost molecules' were exorcised" below). "Water has no 'memory'," he says now. "You can't make an imprint in it and recover it later."
Despite the skepticism over Montagnier's explanation, the consensus was that the results deserve to be investigated further. Montagnier's colleague -- theoretical physicist Giuseppe Vitiello of the University of Salerno in Italy -- is confident that the result is reliable. "I would exclude that it's contamination," he says. "It's very important that other groups repeat it."
In a paper last year (Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences, DOI: 10.1007/s12539-009-0036-7), Montagnier described how he discovered the apparent ability of DNA fragments and entire bacteria both to produce weak electromagnetic fields and to "regenerate" themselves in previously uninfected cells. Montagnier strained a solution of the bacterium Mycoplasma pirum through a filter with pores small enough to prevent the bacteria penetrating. The filtered water emitted the same frequency of electromagnetic signal as the bacteria themselves. He says that he has evidence that many species of bacteria and many viruses give out the electromagnetic signals as do some diseased human cells.
Montagnier says that the full details of his latest experiments will not be disclosed until the paper is accepted for publication. "Surely you are aware that investigators do not reveal the detailed content of their experimental work before its first appearance in peer-reviewed journals," he says.
How 'ghost molecules' were exorcised
The latest findings by Luc Montagnier evoke long-discredited work by the French researcher Jacques Benveniste. In a paper in Nature (vol 333, p 816) in 1988, he claimed to show that water had a "memory" and that the activity of human antibodies was retained in solutions so dilute that they couldn't possibly contain any antibody molecules (New Scientist, July 14, 1988, p 39).
Faced with widespread scepticism over the paper including from the chemist Felix Franks who had advised against publication, Nature recruited magician James Randi and chemist and "fraudbuster" Walter Stewart of the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland to investigate Benveniste's methods. They found his result to be "a delusion" based on a flawed design.
In 1991, Benveniste repeated his experiment under double-blind conditions. But not to the satisfaction of referees at Nature and Science. 2 years later came the final indignity when he was suspended for damaging the image of his institute. He died in October 2004.
That's not to say that quantum effects must be absent from biological systems. Quantum effects have been proposed in both plants and birds. Montagnier and his colleagues are hoping that their paper won't suffer the same fate as Benveniste's.
======
does Water represent Genetic Code?
Matti Pitkänen / January 12, 2011
The furor is about the article "DNA Waves and Water" by L. Montagnier, J. Aissa, E. Del Giudice, C. Lavallee, A. Tedeschi, and G. Vitiello which has not yet been even published.
Already, "DNA waves and water" is enough to induce a deep growl from the throat of a hard-nosed skeptic. And the words "homeopathy" and "water memory" are the signals which transform even civilized skeptic to a raging blood hound.
Water memory at gene level is indeed what the article is about. What makes the situation so problematic is that Montagnier is an HIV Nobelist. It is not so easy to dismiss the work as has been done routinely for all work related to water memory since the days of Benveniste and before.
The story began when Benveniste found evidence for water memory. Water solution of biomolecules was diluted so that there was no trace about the molecules. What Benveniste and collaborators claimed was that the treated water is however somehow able to represent the biologically-relevant properties of molecules so that its action on some biomolecules can be the same as that of the original molecules. This could obviously explain the claimed effects of homeopathy.
Benveniste got a label of "fraudster" in a scientific investigation led by the magician James Randi (true, this is what the standards of skeptic science sadly often are!). The work of Benveniste has, however, been continued behind the scenes and it has been for a long time to possible to reproduce the effects of biologically-active molecules by using only the low frequency electromagnetic spectrum of these molecules. Which suggest that biological signaling relies on low frequency EM radiation. Skeptics have simply dismissed all this research.
That genes have electromagnetic representation have been also claimed by Peter Gariaev and his collaborators for long time ago. For TGD-inspired explanations for the findings of Gariaev, see this and this. The latter link is an article written in collaboration with Peter Gariaev and will be published in the first issue of DNADJ journal during this month.
The claim of Montagnier's team is that the radiation generated by DNA affects water in such a manner that it behaves as if it contained the actual DNA. A brief summary of experiment of Montagnier and collaborators is in order.
1. Two(2) testtubes containing 100 bases long DNA fragments were studied. Both tubes were subjected to 7 Hz electromagnetic radiation. Earth's magnetic field was eliminated to prevent its possible interference. (The cyclotron frequencies of Earth's magnetic field are in EEG range. One of the family secrets of biology and neuroscience since the 1970s is that cyclotron frequencies in magnetic fields have biological effects on vertebrate brain). The frequencies around 7 Hz correspond to cyclotron frequencies of some biologically-important ions in the endogenous magnetic field of 0.2 Tesla explaining the findings. This field is 2/5 of the nominal value of the Earth's magnetic field.
2. What makes the situation so irritating for skeptics who have been laughing for decades for homepathy and water memory is that the repeated dilution process used for the homeopathic remedies was applied to DNA in the recent case. The dilution containing no detectable amounts DNA (dilution factor was 10-12) was placed in second test tube whereas the first test tube contained 100 bases long DNA in the original concentration.
3. After 16-to-18 hours, both tubes were subjected to polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which builds DNA from its basic building bricks using DNA polymerase enzyme. What is so irritating that DNA was generated also in the test tube containing the highly-diluted water. Water seems to be able to cheat the polymerase by mimicking the presence of the actual DNA serving in the usual situation as a template for building copies of DNA. One could also speak about the analog quantum teleportation.
In TGD-inspired Quantum-Bbiology, the representations of genes in terms of temporal patterns of EM radiation are in central role (see this). TGD leads to a concrete model for water memory in terms of the magnetic body of biomolecule whose cyclotron frequency pattern codes for the biological effects of the molecule. Water memory means that water can build magnetic bodies mimicking those of biomolecules or perhaps steal them in the process of dilution which involves the shaking of the solution.
TGD also suggest another representation of the genetic code in terms of dark nucleons which could be highly relevant for the realization of water memory in terms of a dark portion of water for which there exists empirical evidence. This "dark" portion would also explain the numerous anomalies of water.
It became as a total surprise that the states of dark nucleons correspond in natural manner to DNA, RNA, tRNA, and aminoacids. DNA would define only one particular representation of the genetic code which in the primary form would be realized at elementary particle level and that there could exists many representations of DNA. Also, the model for DNA as topological quantum computer proposes a non-standard representation of the code.
The existence of a multitude of representations of the code would not be too surprising when one realizes that the information processing performed by computers involves endless variety of different representations of various codes. The problem is about attitudes. The dogma that Biology is nothing but Chemistry is what is being challenged. We love dogmas because they liberate us from the burden of using our own brains.
Comments
1. At 12:51 PM, Ulla said...
I have come to the conclusion there are 2 kinds of oscillations in the living body (quantal and decoherent) as a kind of giant double-slit exp. We intermingle these and so we see no pattern. But it is there.
Elisabeth Rieper, Janet Anders, Vlatko Vedral
Vedral has written much about quantum biology ( what role might entanglement play in DNA. To find out, they've constructed a simplified theoretical model of DNA in which each nucleotide consists of a cloud of electrons around a central positive nucleus. This negative cloud can move relative to the nucleus, creating a dipole. And the movement of the cloud back-and-forth is a harmonic oscillator.