Norman Allan’s Blog

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I’m Norman Allan, and I was Bruce Pomeranz research associate from 1984 through 1991, so I was in that lab while we were replicating Benveniste work, though I was not directly involved in that project.

The first of  thing I want to tell you is that in our lab, for the most part, the phenomenon was not robust. To begin with we used to see evidence of an ultradilute reactions perhaps in every third or forth attempt.

So to fix this, I believe it was in the winter of 1988, that Elizabeth Davenas came and spent two weeks in our lab to help get us up to speed. While Davenas was with us, indeed, the assay, the reaction was robust, was reliable. And when she left it didn’t disappear; it was still there, but… it degraded, it became less robust over a period of about three weeks after which we were back where we started seeing positive results every third or forth try. That’s why in the Davenas Nature paper you see that Pomeranz claims only that we had interesting preliminary results, and he did a lot of soul-searching about whether to put his name on the paper.

A major consequence of our involvement with Benveniste, was that… because Pomeranz name was on the Nature paper, we were approached in February 1989 by a team of microbiologist from a major North American university, who had stumbled upon an ultradilution anomaly working with DNA. These people, who I’ll call MAME, M. A. M. E., were doing DNA dot-blots, which was then the main technique for identifying specific DNA. Indeed, in the 80s and into the 90s dot-blots were the HIV-AIDS test.

In the dot-blot procedure you spot out fragments of a known single stranded DNA, in serial dilutions (to quantify the assay), and bake them onto a filter paper. This is called the “target”.  Then you prepare the single stranded DNA you wish to identify, to match with the target, you prepare this second DNA as a “probe” by labeling the questioned DNA with, for example, radioactive phosphorus. If the probe includes the same species of DNA as the target, it will bind to its complementary strand and you will see it bound to the target.

You see the binding fading out with the serial decimal dilutions.

Well, in the fall of ’88 a postdoc in MAME’s lab, who I’ll call Dr. ME, spotted his target out to ten to the minus eighteen, and saw a dark spot there.

On his way to the dustbin, to trash this, he showed the anomaly to postgrad in the lab who had just been to a lecture by Jacque Benveniste, who therefore thought, “ultradilution!” and said to Dr. ME, “Do it again.”

Through the fall of ’88 and the winter and spring of ’89, MAME’s lab saw this ultradilute phenomenon consistently,

for instance, in one example, at the 18^th 19^th 25^th 26^th 38^th and 43^rd dilution. Note though, that the active dilution, the active “potency”, was not always in the same place. Sometimes it was at the 16^th, sometimes the 18^th, and at subsequent dilutions there might  be no activity and then at higher a dilution they’d see activity again.

Two interesting thoughts occurred to me. First, if only particular dilutions are active – in the Kentian system we use the 30^th, the 200^th, the 1000^th centesimal… We don’t have to find the active dilution. In which case, maybe the body is “ringing the changes”, generating new “potencies”, creating the active potency, the 26^th, the 18^th, whatever.

And the fact that the activity appears, disappears, reappears… that suggests that what is happening is a harmonic overlay. Let me explain.

Imagine we have a conjurer’s rope, and we take a tenth part out of that rope, stretch it, and twang it. Then we put it back into the original conjurer’s rope. It’s easy to imagine that the vibrating piece is going to entrain the whole rope, and generate harmonic, and, because it’s a dilution, it’s smaller, shorter than the whole rope, we’ll likely get subharmonics too.

Ah, and we’ll loss nine tenths of the amplitude. So we succuss the remedy, creating a blast of vibrations, a white noise. And  from that spectrum, those vibrations that resonate with what’s there drive what’s there, amplify the resonant vibrations, and the vibrations that don’t resonate just pass through. Succussion is an amplification process.

There’s an analogy of harmonic overlays called Poincare’s Return. In this we take an image – let’s take Poincare’s picture.
The mathematician, Poincare proved that if you take information, do a process to it, and then repeat that again and again, you don’t lose the information, and the information will eventually reappear.

So you take a picture, stretch it and fold it back on itself,

and then you repeat that,

and repeat it,

till you end up with what looks like noise, like static on a TV,

but at the 48^th iteration you see a hint of the original,

and

at the 241^st the information comes back.

So with our succussed potencies, we generate higher, and lower, frequencies – we spread out the spectrum of the vibration – and at some potencies MAME’s DNA comes back into register with the original electrical patterning and binds its complementary strand.

CODA. In the late spring or early summer of 1989, Prof. MA submitted an article on this work to Nature. Nature sat on the paper for half a year and then, Prof. MA says, he withdrew it.

In the summer of 1989 MAME moved their lab from an old to a new building, and thereafter the effect was no longer robust,      no longer reliable,      and they gave up working on it.

You can read about this work on my website . There’s a detailed article titled “Beyond Substance”,   and the skinny… Dr. Fisher, the editor of the British Journal of Homeopathy was kind enough to publish a letter I sent him in April ’07.

So, for me  these were the significant consequences  of Benveniste’s work.

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