Luc Montagnier, 2008 Nobel laureate, will follow the steps of Jacques Benveniste

“HIV discoverer and 2008 Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier announced earlier this month that, at age 78, he will take on the leadership of a new research institute at Jiaotong University in Shanghai.He plans to study electromagnetic waves that emanate from the highly diluted DNA of various pathogens, which can reveal the bacterial or viral origins of many conditions, including autism and Alzheimer’s disease.” Martin Enserink, “Luc Montagnier: French Nobelist Escapes “Intellectual Terror” to Pursue Radical Ideas in China,” News of the Week, Science 330: 1732, 24 December 2010.

Montagnier claims that “we have found that DNA produces structural changes in water, which persist at very high dilutions, and which lead to resonant electromagnetic signals that we can measure. Not all DNA produces signals that we can detect with our device. The high-intensity signals come from bacterial and viral DNA. We have found these signals coming from bacterial DNA in the plasma of many patients with autism, and also in most, if not all, patients with Alzheimer, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. It seems that products from gut bacteria end up in the plasma and cause damage to the brain.

Montagnier defends Benveniste (“I think he was mostly right, but the problem was that his results weren’t 100% reproducible”) and homeopathy (“high dilutions of something are not nothing, they are water structures which mimic the original molecules”).

“I can’t pursue this research in France because of French retirement laws, I’m no longer allowed to work at a public institute.”

“Aren’t you worried that your colleagues will think you have drifted into pseudoscience? No, because it’s not pseudoscience. It’s not quackery. These are real phenomena which deserve further study.”

‘No comment’ is my only comment.

BTW: The work of Luc Montagnier is not pure homeopathy, because he uses electromagnetic waves inside his hypothesis, as clarified by Harriet Hall, “The Montagnier “Homeopathy” Study,” Science-Based Medicine, Oct 20, 2009.

BTW2: L. Montagnier, J. Aissa, E. Del Giudice, C. Lavallee, A. Tedeschi, G. Vitiello, “DNA waves and water,” ArXiv, 23 Dec 2010.

“Some bacterial and viral DNA sequences have been found to induce low frequency electromagnetic waves in high aqueous dilutions. This phenomenon appears to be triggered by the ambient electromagnetic background of very low frequency. We discuss this phenomenon in the framework of quantum field theory. A scheme able to account for the observations is proposed. The reported phenomenon could allow to develop highly sensitive detection systems for chronic bacterial and viral infections.”