TWO Nobel laureates are sleeping a little easier, thanks to a legal
technicality. Jacques Benveniste, the French scientist who published a paper in
1988 that appeared to provide a scientific basis for homeopathy, has failed in a
libel action against the scientists because he filed the wrong type of suit.
Benveniste鈥檚 paper, published in Nature (vol 333, p 816), suggested that
water retains a 鈥渕emory鈥� of substances dissolved in it, even after repeated
dilution. Many scientists have disputed this conclusion. But Benveniste, who now
works in a privately funded lab in Clamart, near Paris, felt that a series of
articles published in Le Monde went too far
(This Week, 27 September 1997, p12).
The articles quoted Fran莽ois Jacob, who won the 1965 Nobel for
medicine, Georges Charpak, who won the physics Nobel in 1992, and Claude
Hennion, a physicist at the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris.
Benveniste says he will sue anyone who suggests his work is fraudulent.
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A court has now ruled that he should have filed a criminal suit, not a civil
one, and has ordered him to pay costs. Unless his critics repeat their
statements, Benveniste has little hope of satisfaction. 鈥淚f they believe that
their words are of any value, why don鈥檛 they repeat them?鈥� he asks.