Water Memory (2014 Documentary about Nobel Prize laureate Luc Montagnier)

The notion of water memory was first raised in the 1980s by a renowned scientist called Jacques Benveniste. It immediately sparked a huge scientific controversy. Yet, it is Professor Montagnier, the joint recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology for the discovery of HIV, who took up the torch after Benveniste. Although he had nothing else to prove, why did he choose to risk his career by venturing through the troubled waters of water memory? I've always been searching for the extraordinary. I find it hard to work on an established theory. I'd rather innovate. Driven by curiosity, he applied the technologies of Benveniste on his own research. Following the first experiment on the blood plasma from patients infected with HIV, he detects electromagnetic signals. It came to me as a real surprise. I didn't expect that. And we were all fascinated by this phenomenon, that nobody had ever witnessed until then. This kind of phenomenon wasn't even considered by classical biology. Encouraged by these first results, the professor plunged into water memory. We really felt like pioneers, exploring a new scientific area. A wild jungle, so to speak. It gave me a little vertigo to think about the huge possibilities for medical applications. I'm a trained physician, so I felt an intellectual excitement. I thought it was a fantastic discovery. I began to think that Benveniste was just right. Jacques Benveniste was a renowned biologist in the 1980s, considered as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. But he died in 2004 from a stiff fight to defend his controversial theory against some radical opponents. Thirty years later, the theory is still a red-hot issue. Despite all that, Professor Montagnier has resumed Benveniste's research. But he's learned the lessons from the water memory case. He knows that the road is full of obstacles and that he can only rely on himself, with no backup and no subsidy. I'm a non-conformist. I'm outdated, just like a good old whiskey, because I'm working on a red-hot issue. Professor Montagnier is first of all a medical doctor, a pragmatist. He's convinced that water memory opens a new area of research for medicine. But he must also learn the lessons from the controversial case, that which caused the downfall of his illustrious predecessor. Here in 1992, Jacques Benveniste gives a tour of his lab on a parking lot. This is where we work. A small lab and a trailer, which looks odd, but it actually serves as our storage space. As you can see, we make do with what we've got when you're into research. Especially when your research is temporarily considered extraneous and you get no funds. Here's the lab entrance. I give you a tour if you wish. This is the prefab where Jacques Benveniste finished his last years of lab research. And I started working here with his collaborators in 2005, for a year and a half, before he was in a permanent structure here at the INSERM. And obviously that was a source of disappointment and frustration to leave that modern building to end up in that little room. It's quite a problem because we need to fit 450 square meters into a 100 square meter space. It's quite packed, but it creates a friendly atmosphere with strong interactions within the team. Because the researchers are packed like sardines, they mingle rapidly. So it's a tight-knit team and we're happy with it. As soon as you mention Benveniste, it's like talking about the devil. There was a sense of fear and intellectual terror because the minute you followed Benveniste's track, you were banned. If the results fit with the norm, I'm considered as a good scientist. Under the same conditions, with the same technique and the same lab, if the results are deviant from the actual norm, then I'm considered as a misfit. The system is sick, but I'm not. My advantage over Benveniste is that I got the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the HIV. Therefore, I gained recognition in the scientific community. Yet today, my notoriety is challenged by some who say, he might have discovered the HIV, but he's outdated now. That's completely wrong. These are my best years of research. I'm finding the most important phenomena today. It's a good thing to discover a virus, but finding about the mechanisms of life, that's even more important. Professor Montagnier might have nothing more to lose. He will certainly go down in history for the discovery of HIV. But he probably wants to go down in history for another discovery, related to this iconoclastic but promising theory. Discreetly, he makes progress, and he fights his own corner, equipped with a new tool called water memory. Today, he's decided to lift the veil on his current research to convince us. Water memory is a theory hard to swallow, so the professor invites us to follow him for her groundbreaking experiment, which will cast new light on the surprising properties of water. Hello Jean-Marie, how are you? Very well, and you? Very well, thanks. Today, we're going to perform for television an experiment that we carried for the first time in July 2005. At the time, it was a great surprise to all of us. Then it became a routine. But for you, viewers, this is the first time it's being shown on television. The professor has put on his favorite suit, the doctor's white coat, while our crew is turning his lab into a TV studio. Hello, we're going to take on a delicate experiment of detecting electromagnetic signals from the DNA. First, I'll ask you to please turn off your mobile phones by removing the batteries, because we're going to detect extra-sensitive electromagnetic waves, and the detection might be disturbed by certain mobile phones. Now we're ready to start our experiment of DNA transduction. The transduction experiment carried out by Professor Montagnier before our disturbing cameras seems like science fiction. Starting with the DNA of an HIV-infected patient, he will create a digital file, send it through the Internet to another lab, where the DNA will be reconstituted from that digital file. The professor calls it transduction. We could almost call it teleportation. We're going to detect the electromagnetic background noise, which is actually being disturbed by the cameras. We've never had so many cameras around us before, so it's a new thing for us. There's a big noise which is uncommon here, so it's probably coming from the waves produced by your devices. On the left, you can see a relatively weak background noise. That's normal. But on the right, you can see high-frequency peaks on the spectrum, and they prevent us from detecting lower frequencies, which are covered by that background noise. We can turn off all the spotlights and do a background noise check. Let's try it. You can turn these off. Shall we try again? It's a little better. That's the control. It's a little better now. The shooting methods will have to adapt to the demands of this one-of-a-kind experiment. The crew decides to use the equipment emitting the least electromagnetic signals, like these small fixed cameras. Although our equipment considerably increases the background noise, the professor decides, despite the odds, to carry on the experiment to convince us that water has a memory. So here's a small tube containing diluted DNA from an HIV-infected patient. There's very little DNA in here, but enough to measure the electromagnetic signals. A DNA carries all the genetic information necessary for any organism's development and functioning. It's true for men, for a mushroom, or a bacterium. Each DNA is unique, and it allows to identify each organism just like an ID card. Therefore, we'll be able to compare the DNA reconstituted several hundreds of kilometers away with the DNA stored in the professor's fridge. The experiment will be carried out by Jamal Aissa. He knows the protocol very well since he worked with Benveniste at the beginning of his research. He also helps other teams of scientists to reproduce the experiment in Germany or Italy. This is sterile water used in our lab to make serial dilutions. Making high dilutions consists in adding molecules to a water sample, then performing successive dilutions until all the molecules have disappeared. Here, we're adding just a few DNA molecules from an HIV-infected patient. We take one volume of this solution and we add nine volumes of water. At each stage, we divide by 10 the number of molecules present in the solution. High dilution is at the core of every experiment serving the water memory theory. We put one molecule in contact with water, then we remove that molecule by high dilution. Here we're getting the dilution called D2. We vigorously shake it in a vortex for 15 seconds and then we repeat the operation until the desired dilution is reached. In our case, we're going to make 10 dilutions. For this experiment, a hint of matter, only 2 nanograms are used in the beginning. Thanks to this simple series of manipulations, we quickly obtain solutions where not even a single DNA molecule remains in water. If we carried out the experiment until the 24th dilution, it would be the equivalent of diluting one drop of the original DNA into the Atlantic Ocean. Now the dilutions are finished, it's time for encoding. Much is at stake in this experiment as we're trying to verify the assertions of Professor Montagnier. This is why we'll use a famous protocol called double-blind encoding. I'm going to encode the tubes. A member of the TV crew is going to label all tubes in order to avoid the risk of fraud or influence on the experiment results. I'm distributing random figures. The label is now hidden. It's now impossible to know which tubes correspond to the different dilutions. There are 10 placebo tubes which contain only pure water and 10 tubes which underwent high dilutions. Now we're going to register each encoded solution. The process involves placing the solution on a sensor, a sort of microphone. We're going to record the electromagnetic fields produced by each solution. Jamal Aissaie is trying to collect the electromagnetic signal generated by the tubes placed on the sensor. Then he digitalizes that signal and creates a computer file like you would do it for a sound. However, these tubes only contain water. So what could Jamal possibly collect? I'm going to record the first tube for 6 seconds and I'm going to save that digital file on the hard drive. Here you've got a signal emitted from tube number 2. The next tube is number 9. The first test tubes don't reveal any particular information. Then the experiment starts to give some very surprising results. Against all expectations, it seems like something happened. Some waves have been detected coming out of certain tubes. What are these trails that appear on the screen? Tell us, Jamal. Here I can observe the 20 recorded tubes. 20 tubes, indeed. Here's the tube number 10 and here I observe an increase in the amplitude of the signal. On number 10? Yes, on number 10 and number 3. Tube number 3. There is also an increase in the level of the signal. What about the other tubes? All the other ones are negative. OK, I'm going to tell you to what it does correspond. Tube number 3 corresponds to the 7th dilution. D7. This is tube number 10. This is the 6th dilution. OK, so D6 and D7. As far as the virus is concerned, this is the range of dilutions where we detect the signals. The first part of the experiment seems to be a success. Jamal has identified two tubes which have been in contact with the DNA. Strangely, they generate signals whereas classical physics has it that water does not carry any signal. The professor welcomes the results with peace and serenity. These colors are not actual colors but they represent the different electromagnetic frequencies and you can see that the positive solutions have important blue peaks. These are the signals emitted by water which has been charged with the DNA molecules. Obviously, the solutions have been diluted to such a high degree that not even a single DNA molecule should remain. It's only the structures of the water themselves that emit these signals. According to Professor Montagnier, the highly diluted DNA water has retained a memory of the original DNA traces and it returns them under the form of electromagnetic signals. Classical biology and classical physics had never considered such a phenomenon. It's very hard to admit for a certain number of our colleagues including Nobel laureates who strongly refute these ideas but these are facts. This is an established scientific fact. Having a renowned researcher and Nobel laureate telling you face to face that water can receive and transmit signals is already very disconcerting. Now he wants to transfer the digital file through the internet and use it to reconstitute the DNA 1,500 km away. So, I'm ready to send you the file from RTR DNA. Ok. It's ok. Done. Very good. So, Jamal, I just received your email with two files. Perfect. So, we are ready for the final experiments. Thank you. The experiment is carried on in Italy at the University of Benevento famous for the quality of its lab specialized in molecular biology. I must say that in the beginning our Italian colleagues were quite skeptical. I was skeptical as well when we started to talk with Professor Vitiello about the possibility of reproducing what Professor Montagnier was convinced to do. But they accepted very kindly and very generously to carry out this experiment with us. I'm glad to change my mind because probably I'm still open to news. It's a challenge also for my reputation for my story of a scientist. I mean, I take the challenge. The Italian team is going to carry out Professor Montagnier's experiment the other way around. The signals recorded in France will be processed by the computer and sent into a tube of purified water. According to the professor, this water tube will listen to these signals and memorize them. A tube of purified water is handed to Professor Vitiello who will lead the Italian part of the experiment. He's a professor of physics at the university and he regularly co-publishes with Professor Montagnier on the water memory theory. So we put the water inside the solenoid and all of it inside this new metal cylinder in order to avoid interference with other radiations which might be in this room. And then we play the signal of LTR HIV virus and let the water listen to the music. Let me call it the music. This will remain like it is now, listening to music for about one hour. That's it. One aspect of the beautifulness of this experiment is that it is quite simple. There's a striking contrast between the simplicity of the operation, the few means required, and the far-reaching stakes of the experiment. The experiment blends futuristic modernity and a simple, traditional and empirical scientific approach. Not many times I have one hour to spend except in this case. You put something there and then you wait for what happens and in this case it's almost a miracle because what we are doing is often thought to be so much exotic, so strange from a scientific point of view. But it's very good also because people dislike it. It means that there is something new. If there is nothing to be discussed it's like putting a new light in a room already lighted. So waiting for water listening to that music gives me the opportunity together with this environment to have such thought which makes me they make me quite young I should say. I feel like when I started doing research. Now it's time to take out this water from here. Maybe Antonio if you could bring that to Lina. Lina, the biologist is preparing the different tubes containing the elements required for the last phase of the experiment. She adds the water which has listened to the DNA music. Lina uses PCR a technology which has revolutionized molecular biology lab work in the last 20 years but also the field of forensic science for the identification of criminals. PCR consists in putting in water some chemical elements building blocks called nucleotides. They are the organic molecules of DNA. An enzyme called polymerase will play the role of a catalyzer. At first the components remain still. Nothing happens. But if we introduce fragments of a DNA thanks to polymerase we can reconstitute the complete sequence of the DNA. We'll have enough elements to identify which one belongs to this DNA. This phenomenon, the polymerase chain reaction, earned Carey Mullis a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. But here for this experiment there's no DNA matter physically speaking, but only water which has listened to a DNA signal sent from Paris. We shouldn't expect anything to happen because it's impossible that the DNA sequence of the virus could rebuild itself alone without any model. It would be like wanting to make a copy without the original. Professor Vitiello and the head of the University of Benevento interpret the results of the PCR on the screen. What do these bands reveal? Has the water of Benevento listened to the song of that Parisian DNA? These bands represent DNA and this is success. Otherwise you have no bands or you have just scrambled. You are lucky because not always it comes so nice. If it's normal to see those characteristic bands appear on screen after a PCR, a sign that DNA has actually been reconstituted, in our case it's quite staggering. The tube actually contains only some basic elements, but no trace of DNA. How can one DNA molecule be reconstituted without any model? It's breathtaking. Every time for us is exciting because we feel that this is really a turning point not only for biology but also for physics. I would say for knowledge in general. And this is very... I'm glad to share with you. The joys of science are sometimes impenetrable for us non-specialists. Yet Giuseppe manages to communicate his enthusiasm for these little black bands which appeared on screen and which marked the beginning of a great scientific adventure. This is unbelievable, but I understand people who are skeptical. We started to go alcoholic because at every success we opened the French Champagne in the aura of your nation. Yet there's one more step to go before we can validate the experiment. One independent laboratory is going to analyze one of the DNA sampled after the PCR operation. They will obtain a sequence that we can compare with the sequence of the Parisian DNA. And this simple sheet of paper will allow us to know if the long-distance DNA duplication worked well. I've just received the first results of the experiment carried out in Italy at Benevento, and they obviously proved that a DNA transduction was possible. The sequences are 98% identical, nearly completely identical. 98% of common elements. That's enough to say that the experiment is a success. It makes a lot of people grind their teeth because it's not so easy to explain, is it? And of course there are many things to be explained. It's not understood completely. Very often science does not give answers but open questions. So we now have more questions than before just because it works. One of the most interesting aspects of the water memory theory is that it raises lots of questions and it urges scientists to challenge the established doctrine. In science, as in any other field, it's hard to build certainties and decide what's right or wrong. Now we must try to understand what happened in these water tubes. Marc Henri, a professor of chemistry and quantum physics at the University of Strasbourg, will shed some light for us. His publications include an article written with Italian scientists. Okay, so we're going to talk about liquid water, precisely water from the river as the sea, tap water. Let's try to define that water. Obviously the starting point is, and that's what chemistry teaches us, a water molecule containing one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. To simplify things, let's represent the molecule in the shape of a circle. Now, water molecules have the capacity to hold hands with each other. Think of it as a group of children doing a circle dance. If the chain of molecules is long enough, it can form a circle creating an enclosed space between the molecules where matter cannot get in. However, anything electromagnetic can get in. All these signals can be trapped inside that space and that's what we call coherent domain. Our scientists assumed that the Parisian DNA in contact with water emitted electromagnetic signals which went to launch themselves into the coherent domains. These signals carrying the information of the original molecule allegedly got trapped in these aggregates of millions of water molecules. Although the DNA disappeared through the high dilutions, these entrapped signals simulate the DNA and its properties. Then what happened to these water tubes in Italy during the PCR operation? Scientists only hold hypotheses. But if the polymerase did its job by reconstituting a complete sequence of DNA, it's because it found the necessary information thanks to the signals entrapped in water. Much work remains to be done, but for Professor Montagnier, the experiment proved that water could have a sort of memory. It would be a real intellectual and scientific revolution opening huge possibilities. We cannot simply say, no, no, it's impossible, bury our head and do nothing. On the contrary, we must carry out more experiments, independently, and if we're actually right, we will find the same results. Only then will we move medicine into a new era, a medicine which will allow us to treat patients with signals and water. This new vision of water properties has major implications for medicine. The capacity of water to store and transmit information would make it play a greater role in our bodies. In this recipient, there are 56 liters of water. It's approximately the quantity of water contained in a human body of 80 kilos. So water is definitely the most important element in our body. Water is the main component of the human body. Our body is made up of 70% water. It circulates in our body mixed with our vital fluids. But it's also very present in our cells. Here the conditions are favorable to the creation of many coherent domains which can trap many signals. Water is the first thing we should be taught in a biology class. Today, if you open a biology book, what do you find? One or two pages on water and 5,000 pages on anything but water. So we would like biology to take that dimension into consideration. Instead of water volume, if we started thinking in terms of the number of molecules in our body, the numbers would speak even more volumes. If you reason in terms of numbers, our body is made up of 99% from that substance we call water. Imagine yourself inside a cell, count until 100, and you'll be saying water 99 times, and one time out of 100, you'll say protein, DNA, magnesium, calcium, and whatnot. These 1%, which don't represent water, but rather represent molecules of calcium and proteins, are sufficiently small to be governed by the strange laws of the physics of the infinitely small quantum physics. With a cell, you're dealing with the microscale. In that case, classical physics legitimately come into play. However, when I'm dealing with the component, meaning protein or DNA molecule, I'm on a nanoscale, dealing with nanometers, and that's where quantum physics come into play. It's a matter of scale. If you're looking for the closest gas station, you're not going to use a world map. In physics, it's the same. You need the right tool. If you want to understand how a cell works, you must do quantum physics. In the strange world of quantum physics, there's no distinction between signal and matter. An atom is both considered as a particle and as a signal. Precisely, the water memory theory talks about signals which would have the same properties as the matter itself. They're certainly a key to understanding what's going on in the tubes of Professor Montagnier. The problem at the moment is that biologists are required to be experts in physics and chemistry at the same time, and that's not so easy for them. Quantum physics dates back one century, but it has never been truly integrated by biologists. However, trying to understand how our cells work using quantum physics is a revolutionary idea. Professor Montagnier's experiment allows us to discover that certain biological elements emit signals. These are signals his team follows in their promising medical research. For your information, the importance of this research is the theoretical basis, but also the practical basis. The medical applications are, of course, very important. The professor suspects that serious chronic diseases also have microbial causes. Normally, the signals emitted by the DNA of the microbes and caught in the water of patients' blood disappear after a while. If he detects them in a repeated manner in high dilutions, it means that a pathogenic agent associated with the disease has settled in the organism. We were able to link the presence of the signals in the blood of very serious and widespread diseases. As for chronic diseases like Alzheimer, Parkinson, certain sclerosis, and many others I'll not name, also autism in children and certain cancers. Here it's the sequential dilutions that emit positive frequencies, therefore DNA. Of people with Alzheimer? Yes. And this has very important medical applications since antibiotic treatments over a long period together with other treatments allow significant healing of these patients at the same time they make the signals diminish or disappear. But this approach is extremely disputed by the scientific community. The professor gave a speech at the Academy of Medicine on his discoveries concerning certain forms of autism, provoking a genuine outcry within the venerable institution. However, it has already given way to concrete results. Today's health with these promising findings, will we be able to cure autists thanks to antibiotics? This is today's exclusive story. Although you no longer can see it, this talkative little boy is totally at ease in front of the camera. He is an autist, and he owes his metamorphosis to his doctor. Alexander took antibiotics very regularly and then more and more spaced out for a first period of six months, and then a little less during the next six months, and for the second year he had no treatment unless he had a setback, because often there are little setbacks. About a dozen doctors in France prescribe anti-infectious drugs for autistic children. Among the 204 treated in six years, four children out of five saw their symptoms strongly regress or disappear. In the Paris suburbs, Professor Montagnier is exploring the infectious track. He has put into place a new technology to track the latent infections in the young autists' And autism is in the hands, or to begin with, was in the hands of psychoanalysts, brain specialists in neurosciences, and we, of course, have thought of an infectious track because we found signals in the blood of most autistic patients. In plain language, what Professor Montagnier says is that we can cure certain serious diseases with antibiotics, targeted and used on the long term. But the eventual applications of water memory are not limited to the detection of a disease. In fact, the signals emitted and stored by water in contact with a molecule would then propagate the properties of this molecule and hence its action. The day when we admit that the signals can have tangible effects, we'll use them. From that moment, we'll be able to treat patients with waves. Therefore, it's a new domain of medicine that people fear, of course, especially the pharmaceutical industry. But that is not excluded for the moment. It's extremely empirical. But one day, all that will be defined and we'll be able to treat cancers using frequency waves. These applications come directly from the experiment that the professor did before us in his laboratory. Imagine that in place of a DNA molecule, we introduce into the water a molecule of a medicine. We could, after high dilutions, register on paper the waves of this medicine, then re-emit them so as to simulate its presence and thus its beneficial effects. This approach is totally revolutionary because up to now, classical chemistry established that chemical molecules have an impact when they come in contact with each other but not from a distance. There again, the scientific community is firmly opposed to this approach. If we treat with frequencies and not with medicines, it becomes extremely cost-effective regarding the amount of money spent, since we spend a lot of money to find the frequencies, but once they have been found, it costs nothing to treat. Because in this case, medicines cost a few cents and there you have it. That would mean there would be no more social security deficits. And you can think that I can have an app sending you the proper information to your body to obtain an effect. So Steve Jobs last year think about that, a smartphone that could be the object, the healing object for the next future. And this is not so far away. Whether it be about the detection of serious diseases or therapies by wave medicine, a new approach in biology is emerging, based on the information that wave frequencies can carry inside our cells. These are probably the premises of digital biology that Jacques Benveniste foresaw in his prefabricated lab in the 80s. So what you see here is an isolated heart that comes from a guinea pig. This guinea pig was made to be allergic to olvabumin, the egg white. If we pass the egg white over the heart, it goes into an allergic shock. If we pass what we call digital olvabumin, the heart makes no distinction between digital or real olvabumin. In the same way that our ear cannot make the difference between a digital sound on a CD and the real person who speaks or sings. It's the same sound for the ear. 30 years later, we're still at the same point, even if Professor Montagnier has escaped from the prefabricated building. The applications of the theory of water memory seem promising for a very low cost in experimentation. Why are there not more teams working on the subject? Professor Montagnier gathers around him a small group of scientists in Europe, the USA, or in Asia. The scientists and their majority seem a little inclined to take a stand on this theory. We have tried to interview those who contradict the theory, but no one seems willing to openly take a stand on this strange theory whose greatest defender is a Nobel Prize recipient. One of the rare scientists to take an interest in the subject, Jacques Testa is a biologist and the Honorary Research Director at Inserm Institute. He is responsible for the first test tube baby in France. I believe that today someone who would like to work on the memory of water will have to be able to interest the businessmen. But the institutions don't put a penny on something that is so marginal and that will immediately be fought by all scientific groups. And we have chosen to work with the private sector because no funds could come from public institutions. The Benveniste case has made it so that anyone who takes an interest in the memory of water is considered as... I mean, it smells of sulfur, it's hell. If Professor Montagnier indeed inherited the scientific research done by Benveniste, he has to assume that smell of sulfur that floats around anyone who meddles with the memory of water. To understand what is going on today, we have to go back 30 years in time to the beginnings of the Benveniste case. In 1985, Jacques Benveniste follows the classical pathway to validating any discovery, that is to say, to publish in an international scientific journal. Then I sent the results of my research work to Nature, the most respected research journal in which I had already published four articles, so people knew who I was. And then at that moment, everything exploded. Benveniste article published by Nature was exceptionally coupled with a warning announcement saying that the journal was going to send a committee to Clamart, a committee made up of John Maddox, the journal's director, Walter Stewart, expert in scientific hoax, and even a conjurer, James Randi. Frank Nuschi, who had a medical background, was a journalist in the medical section of Le Monde in the 80s, when he was a regular visitor at the Benveniste laboratory. At that time, it just so happens that Benveniste, who wanted me to be a witness of all that, asked me to be in the laboratory and to disguise myself as a lab researcher. So I was dressed in a white coat and therefore I was a truly privileged witness of all the proceedings of what we can call an investigative commission of Nature. At first, all went very well. The experiments worked out, which drove them a little wild, especially Stewart and Randi. Then, quite quickly, the scientific expert for Nature demanded Benveniste to use a more and more complex protocol, and to pass the time, next to Benveniste struggling with his tubes of water, the magician kept up his magic tricks. The expertise proved to be a trap. What was going to happen happened. Once again, I do not claim, I have never claimed, that Benveniste was right. What I mean to say is that they put in place these procedures totally out of the ordinary in order to show that he was wrong. I'm convinced of that. Benveniste's experiments began to no longer work, so everything was thrown off balance. The team of Nature went back to London, and a little later, the journal published an article discrediting Benveniste and his research. Benveniste's destiny was sealed, and with him, that of the memory of water. And very quickly, a certain number of well-known scientists and doctors adopted a definite position against Benveniste. They practically made him out to be a mystic, while there is no one more rational than Jacques. But most of his colleagues didn't want to hear about it. For them, it was impossible, because if there are no molecules, nothing can come out of it. I'd say that this is an example of obscurantism on the part of scientists. It's a paradox, because the purpose of science, by definition, is to bring light in comparison with religious obscurantism. What is not normal is that people were so mean with such a high-level researcher. All the same, he died from it. I'm not saying that anyone killed him, but I mean, there came a time when he could no longer bear the situation he was in. It's one thing to criticize, and another to assassinate someone, almost physically. He was the Galileo of the 20th century. I think he would have been burned at the stake for his theories in the 17th century. By definition, it's the role of a researcher's research. But Benveniste seemed to have been condemned beforehand for his positions that went against the scientific dogma at the time. Should you be sentenced for having an opinion in science? Benveniste said, but good God, instead of criticizing me, a priori, help me. Try out in your respective laboratories, each one of you, try to reproduce what I did. That's all I'm asking. But it's true that at the time, I was skeptic, but unlike others, I never lost trust in his research, nor in him as a person. There's one scientist who followed his research from afar, and who sometimes had openly said, but let him work, let him work, you never know. This scientist was Luc Montagnier, who was already at the time engaged in an enormous research which was the discovery of the HIV virus. I also went through some hard times where nobody believed in what I could find. For one year, we knew that we had detected the actual virus. When I say we, it's a little research group, about 10 people, and no one believed us. Our articles were rejected. It's not so important when you're dealing with scientific theories, but it's serious for people, for the medical world. We make monumental mistakes in medicine, and we continue to make mistakes today. You have to fight. You don't have any other choice, and Benveniste demonstrated that. But we have to fight today, not to make our ideas triumph, but rather to try improving the human condition. It's typical of Montagnier's personality to venture on risky roads full of obstacles and controversies. Even if Montagnier discovers extraordinary things, some people will say, great, he's a Nobel Prize, but he's aged a lot, he's talking nonsense. I've already heard people say that. Some people have written that I was sick. It's unbelievable, when in fact I have all my intellectual capacities, perhaps not all my physical ones, but my intellect is intact. People question me, you see, the same way they questioned Benveniste. They keep saying, he's cheating. It can't be otherwise. History repeats itself. Professor Montagnier finds himself in the same position as Jacques Benveniste 30 years ago. If he wants his research to be recognized, he has to publish articles. He has in fact already published in a scientific journal, the Journal of Physics, with a more limited distribution than Nature or Science. I'm told you should publish in Science or Nature. I have published a good many articles in these journals in the past. I could have a try at it. I can do a called survey and send in an article and we'll see if it's returned by mail or not. But I shall not give up. We hold on because we have the facts. We have the facts and above all their medical applications. The professor is focusing today on his long time fight against AIDS. He still hopes to be able to eradicate the disease. He's trying to identify in the blood of infected patients the unknown biological elements associated with HIV. He's working on detecting the signals emitted after high dilutions. He perhaps has come to an interesting discovery. Everything started with the measure of the electromagnetic signals as we found at the beginning, contrary to many other diseases, two types of signals coming from HIV infected patients. We know that the virus is there, but now we're conducting research on the bacteria. We're trying to identify the origin of these signals of a bacterial type and we could possibly get rid of the bacteria more easily than the HIV virus itself. That could be a means of stopping the epidemic if we could succeed in blocking this agent that is perhaps involved in the transmission of the virus. Professor Montagne's theory is that this bacteria works together with the HIV virus. This is what is called a cofactor and he has been researching this for 30 years. Today the professor is tracking this cofactor, the one he singled out thanks to techniques of electromagnetic detection. Now he hopes to detect it on the screen of the electronic microscope from INRA. Here we are. Let's take a seat. Let's go fishing. Fishing for the cofactor. The professor seems self-confident and having fun fishing, but a great deal is at stake. The identification of this bacteria could open the door to new therapies against HIV, much lighter and easier than the present triad therapies. But also that would validate in fact a method of electromagnetic detection derived from the theory of water memory. A huge revenge for him and for Benveniste. There, we saw something. That's the membrane of a red cell and then, surprise, in the background these three microorganisms are infecting the red cells, even in healthy people. The professor has found a bacteria that he thinks is the cofactor. Perhaps it could be an important advance in the fight against HIV. We will be able to have confirmation in the near future. It's a discovery and I'm quite satisfied with it because for a long time I've had this hypothesis, but I did not find the corresponding organism. A lot of researchers do not believe in the transmitting cofactors, but on the contrary, for many years I had this hypothesis. The scientific facts can now prove it. If you see something, no one can deny its existence, except for imbeciles. Luc Montagnier stands out against Jacques Benveniste, whose approach was more militant, fighting for the defense of his vision of science. For the professor, water memory is a technology that could probably help him crush his old enemy. If one day I go to a conference with a man or a woman next to me who might say, I had AIDS, I had AIDS, but I was healed by Professor Montagnier's discovery, I would be in heaven, swimming with angels. The pragmatic professor hopes to be able to change his colleague's mentalities by offering immediate medical applications. The history of science shows that when new concepts emerge, at the beginning they are fiercely attacked and they end up being accepted by everyone. That's the eternal problem with science. That is called the paradigm shift. That is to say that we evolve in one frame and then at one given moment we move to another dimension. Making research means to listen, to be there, to believe in something but to be ready to believe in the opposite. So you are completely free. There you need to abandon little by little your beliefs and take the plunge. Will the theory of water memory dissolve in the history of science or permit Professor Montagnier to achieve significant medical advances? We would like for science to decide and tell us where the truth lies, what is true, what is false. But it's not always possible. Certain facts, certain theories shake dogma and invalidate the established truths. In that respect, a constructive debate should take place among researchers. Those who wish so should be able to freely carry out their research in that direction even if they're wrong. This is the only way science can advance.