UNESCO to host meeting on ‘memory of water’ research with Luc Montagnier

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is potentially wading into hot water next month when it hosts a meeting set up by Nobelist Luc Montagnier to discuss his controversial research on what has become known as “the memory of water.” The afternoon at the agency’s Paris headquarters will feature talks about the virologist’s widely ridiculed idea that water can carry information via an electromagnetic imprint from DNA and other molecules.

The meeting has so far raised little public opposition from researchers, but the announcement on UNESCO’s website acknowledges its controversial nature, saying:

Montagnier, 82, who shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2008 for the discovery of HIV, stunned many fellow scientists about 5 years ago with claims that DNA emits weak electromagnetic waves that cause structural changes in water that persist even in extremely high dilutions. Montagnier considers himself an intellectual heir to the controversial French scientist Jacques Benveniste, who claimed in a 1988 Nature paper that water can retain “memories” of compounds even when diluted at a very high level—a claim that caused a sensation in the press and was taken as support of homeopathy by its proponents, but that other scientists weren’t able to replicate.

At the meeting, Montagnier says he will present new, unpublished results showing that living cells can pick up patterns of electromagnetic waves—even when they’re sent over the Internet to another lab—and synthesize the DNA encoded in them. [Source]