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From the archive: Alternative medicine, and the provenance of health misinformation

Nick Beard
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From the archive: Alternative medicine, and the provenance of health misinformation

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 1, from 1989.

Interest in ‘alternative medicines’ is said to be increasing. However, a common criticism of alternative medicines is that there is little evidence that they work. Medicine is often accused of having double standards on this point, as many orthodox treatments have not been subjected to rigorous trials. To see why this accusation is unfounded, the nature of medical evidence should be examined in more detail.

There are two types of evidence that a treatment works: confirmatory and supportive, the former being stronger evidence than the latter. Valid clinical trials are the surest type of investigation, ideally using randomised double-blind controlled methods. A double-blind trial compares an experimental remedy with a placebo — an inert substance — which is made to look like the remedy being investigated. Neither the patient nor the assessor of the patient’s progress know whether active medicine or placebo is being taken. Patients are assigned to either the placebo or experimental group randomly, and quite large numbers are required to be sure of statistically significant results. Such trials are the only truly scientific method of assessing the value of a remedy.

However, it is difficult to conduct such trials, and in the interim, patients must be treated. For example, we must await the results of double-blind trials for appendicectomies. In the absence of confirmatory evidence, the only alternative is a less certain method — an informed judgement on the basis of science and knowledge of principles of human physiology, pathology and pharmacology. Supportive evidence is collated from laboratory work and indirect clinical research from numerous disciplines. A less precise but valuable view can thus be formed — and we continue to remove inflamed appendices.

It is important to contrast both these methods with clinical impression. ‘I have seen N patients with condition X, and treated them all with remedy Y, and my impression is that they have all benefited’, say the practitioners. The recognition that such impressions are totally inadequate as the basis of assessment of remedies was a great step forward for medicine — a step none of the alternative therapies have taken.

Alternative practitioners excuse the absence of proper trials by saying that their treatments are too personalised, too tailored for specific patients to allow randomised, double blind trials. This might be a true description of their practice—but beneath it lies a serious question. If such specific, sensitive remedies are concocted anew for each patient, where does the knowledge come from which enables this?

Homeopathy serves as a good example with which to examine this point more carefully. A patient suffering from condition X approaches a homeopath. The homeopath listens to the patient (which, despite much propaganda to the contrary, most doctors would!) and arrives at the conclusion that distillate of dogwort is required. There is however, no proper research to show that this substance is effective for condition X — only a 150-year-old suspicion that undiluted dogwort causes similar symptoms to condition X when swallowed by healthy subjects. How does the practitioner know to use this substance? The stock answer is that the remedies are chosen by the application of principles, the law of similars in the case of homeopathy, and a knowledge of the homeopathic pharmacopia. If, in the absence of controlled trials, this is to be considered an acceptable reply, then there must be some evidence that the principles of the practice are valid ones.

Given the paucity of in vivo evidence, some alternative practitioners (although not many!) turn to laboratory research in their hunt for evidence—to support their claims to be using valid principles. Last year Nature published a paper which claimed to provide in vitro evidence for an effect which could have helped to explain homeopathy—the start of the Benveniste fiasco. The research appeared to show that basophil degranulation (an immune response in white blood cells) continued to be triggered by solutions of an antigen even to concentrations of 10-120, However, this was followed shortly afterwards by a damning report from a team of investigators who found serious errors in the research methods involved, invalidating the research.

If treatments are not proven, they are experimental. It is surely highly questionable to make people pay for such remedies, in addition to the health risks involved. Examining the field of alternative medicine, one is left with a bleak impression. There seems to be a collection of remedies with no evidence of their efficacy, being selected according to principles without foundation. Those who would consider such remedies should beware—but is it right that the principle of caveat emptor (let buyer beware) should apply to health care? I think not. I believe it is time for better regulation of this field.

From the archive: Explaining the Turin Shroud – the creation of a religious hoax

Steve Donnelly
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From the archive: Explaining the Turin Shroud – the creation of a religious hoax

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 6, from 1988.

When the Turin Shroud was last put on display in Turin Cathedral in 1978, more than 3.5 million pilgrims flocked to see it, but if it ever goes on public display again it will be merely as a 14th century work of art.

The results of carbon dating experiments carried out at laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona were, after a considerable delay, officially announced on 13 October and indicate clearly that the shroud is a piece of linen which was woven between AD 1260 and 1390. The image on the shroud of an apparently crucified man is now quite unambiguously not the image of Jesus Christ mysteriously imprinted at the moment of resurrection.

Cover of the book 'Inquest on the Shroud of Turin' by Joe Nickell, PhD - in collaboration with scientific and technical experts. Subtitled 'Latest Scientific Findings'. An image of the 'shroud' imprint features.
Cover of ‘Inquest on the Shroud of Turin‘ by Joe Nickell, PhD

The only remaining mystery appears to be how a mediaeval forger managed to produce a lasting image which has some of the properties of a photographic negative. Dr Joe Nickell has spent a number of years researching this very question and has written a book on his findings entitled Inquest on the Shroud of Turin. On 29 September, two weeks before the long awaited official announcement, I interviewed Joe Nickell for the BBC Radio 4 programme, Science Now. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview.

SD: The aspect of the shroud which is in the news at the moment is the carbon dating, but what I’d like to talk about are the various hypotheses which have been put forward to explain the image. The reason for this is that, assuming that the question of the dating has been settled, I think the question in everybody’s mind is going to be how did the image get there, if it wasn’t by miraculous means at the time of Christ? Could you tell us a little about the various hypotheses that have been put up over the decades or over the centuries to account for the image?

JN: Of course. The shroud first came to light in the middle ages and the earliest report is a bishop’s report to Pope Clement that the forger had been found, and had confessed, and so the earliest claims are that the shroud image was cunningly painted. But, when the shroud was first photographed by Secondo Pia in 1898, it was found that the darks and lights on the negative were reversed. That is to say that when you looked at the glass plate negative you saw a positive rather than a negative image, and so the modern era of shroud studies really began there with people asking how it could be possible for a forger to produce a photographic negative in the middle ages.

Actually the question is a little bit of a bogus one because it isn’t a true photographic negative. There are blank spaces in the image that would not be in a photographic image. Also the colour of the hair is reversed, so that in a positive image Jesus looks like a white-haired and white-bearded old man.

But, putting that aside, the earliest obvious theory that would be consistent with the shroud being genuine was that it was simply an imprint made from the body being covered with the burial spices myrrh and aloes, and that this had caused an imprint on the shroud. The problem is, as I’ve found by experimenting along those lines, that you get a severe wraparound distortion. That is when you press a cloth around a three dimensional form like the human face with the nose sticking out the way it does, you get severe distortions with elongated eye sockets and other distortions that are really rather grotesque.

SD: So it’s a bit like a projection of the Earth’s surface onto a flat plane?

JN: It is a mapping type problem, yes, and it is such a severe problem there is no way of getting around it. Also people realised later that there were places which had been imprinted which would not have been touched by a draped cloth. So a fellow named Paul Vignon suggested that there must have been some form of imprinting across a distance. He postulated the so-called vaporograph theory, which included the notion that body vapours-weak ammonia vapours from morbid body sweat might have interacted with the burial spices on the cloth to produce a so-called vapour photo.

SD: But it seems to me that this would not give rise to a very detailed image.

JN: Right. In fact I experimented with that technology. I used a sculpture, coated it with ammonia and used a cloth treated with phenolphthalein and draped it over, and of course what I got is what most scientists could extrapolate would happen – a big blur. And that theory has been negated now and no one pays any attention to it.

Then, because of the faint brown or sepia colour of the image, which is approximately the colour of a scorch, people suggested that maybe it was caused by a burst of radiant energy at the moment of resurrection. The problem with that is that the image on the cloth is very superficial. It does not penetrate through the fibres to the back of the cloth. And while this was used to argue that it was not a painting, it also argues against radiation because there is no radiation known that would travel the varying distances from body to cloth and, as soon as it hit the cloth, drop to zero.

SD: So any kind of radiation, ultraviolet for instance, wouldn’t just scorch the very surface of the fibres. You’re saying it would penetrate?

JN: That’s right. But also there are problems with the fact that the image would really have to be focused in order to get an image that’s not blurred and distorted. What one is doing when one goes down that path is just invoking a miracle. And so the question then is whether there is any reason to invoke a miracle. Is the prima facie evidence of a nature that we should give up other explanations? And my position is that we know from a body of evidence that the shroud was produced by an artist in the middle ages.

SD: What scientific analysis, other than the carbon dating, has been carried out on the image and blood-stained areas?

JN: An earlier series of tests was done by a once-secret commission which later produced a report, although it has been very difficult for people to obtain copies of the original report. But we do know that they took threads out of the shroud from the so-called blood-stained areas and these went to forensic laboratories in which internationally known forensic experts tested them using all the standard tests, then the more specific tests for blood and blood compounds, and the fibres failed all those tests.

The Church authorities did not like this, apparently, so they issued a rebuttal report, but later the Shroud of Turin Research Project visited Turin and they lifted sticky tape samples from the fibres just by placing the tape on the cloth, peeling it off and mounting these on microscope slides. The samples were first analysed at the world-renowned McCrone forensic laboratories in Chicago. Immediately they found traces of various substances identifiable as paint pigments. They found red iron oxide of a type used in the pigment red ochre and smaller amounts of vermilion and rose madder.

SD: Are these all pigments that were used in medieval times?

JN: Right. Even some pro-shroud analysts found traces of the vermilion but much smaller traces than McCrone. One of the big questions was whether that red iron oxide was primarily on the image area or not. McCrone’s results, in a blind study, demonstrated that the iron oxide was on the image areas and very little on the off-image areas.

McCrone then took the view that the image was a painting. I have a problem with that viewpoint because again the body image is superficial and does not soak through the cloth whereas the so-called blood areas do soak through. Later tests after McCrone (although by pro-shroud people which makes a bit of a problem for objectivity) seem to have found that there is very little pigment or very little iron oxide, and that what you see as a body image is really just a yellowing of the cloth.

So what I think might have happened is that a powdered pigment was rubbed onto the fibres and over time that has caused a yellowing just by its presence on there. That is, by being slightly acidic, it has stained the cloth over time and most of the powder has been sloughed off.

SD: You have written a book entitled Inquest on the Shroud of Turin on your investigations into the shroud, and in the book you write about a type of rubbing technique which you have used to produce an image very similar to the shroud image. Can you tell me a bit about this and whether you feel that a medieval forger would have had the skill required to produce such an image?

JN: Joe Nickell master forger! Well, when I began to realise that wraparound distortion was a problem, and when I found out about the lack of history, the forger’s confession and so forth and also the presence of some reddish granules – although at that time we didn’t know what they were! – I began to seriously consider the possibility of artistry. I had eliminated contact imprinting. I had eliminated vaporography. The miraculous theory, of course, could not be tested and I felt was not yet warranted until we had tried everything.

So I then took the other category of possible solutions – artistry – and began to work on it. Immediately it occurred to me that a full three-dimensional sculpture would not work. But there did seem to be evidence that it was not a painting and that it did have three-dimensional information – there have been microdensitometer tracings and other studies that show that the darks and lights of the image are consistent with some kind of three dimensional form.

SD: Can we just recap on why you felt it wasn’t a painting? This was due to the lack of penetration of pigment into the fibres?

JN: Right. There was no evidence of capillary action where there would be a soaking of a fluid medium into the fibres of the shroud except in the blood areas. There also were no brush marks, and of course there was the phenomenon of light and dark reversal which would be another unusual characteristic for a painting.

And there were other indications. For example there were various flaws in the image that were interesting. There were the blank spaces we talked about earlier and a number of things that indicated to me that we might be dealing with some kind of imprinting technique from a bas-relief; a low sculpted relief, not a full three-dimensional relief, but not a flat plate like an engraving. So my first experiments were to try to make an actual print by coating the bas-relief and pressing cloth to it.

SD: So you’re talking about a fairly familiar technique – brass rubbing?

JN: Well that was the next step. Printing was a possible technique but it had some serious drawbacks. So I then tried a technique, as you pointed out, analogous to brass rubbing except that usually we put a paper on a fiat surface and rub it. In this case I was using cloth and a curved form, but by wetting the cloth and moulding it to the bas-relief I was able to form the cloth to the relief, rather like a mask.

Then, when the cloth was thoroughly dry, I took a dauber and some powdered pigment and rubbed it on carefully in strokes. When I did this the dauber hit the prominences and left the recesses blank, and since the prominences in a positive image, like a face, are in highlight my technique produced the prominences as dark areas. So it made a systematic quasi-negative image just like the shroud image. It had the darks and lights reversed, the hair was still white in the positive image, there were blank spaces and tonal gradations and, in all, there were some thirty points of similarity between my images and the shroud images at the visual or macroscopic level and even at the microscopic level.

The only differences, I believe, are those due to the effects of 600 years during which time the image would be expected to have yellowed the cloth and most of the powdered pigment would have sloughed off.

SD: How confident are you that you have arrived at the technique which was used in the 14th century to do the forgery?

JN: I have a very high degree of confidence. It is very unlikely, in my thinking, that the shroud is an ordinary painting. There are serious problems with that, although there are ways around the difficulties. For example if you wanted the pigment not to soak into the cloth you could give the cloth a coat of a sealer of some kind. The problem there is why would you have the blood areas soaking through; why would parts of it soak through and parts not? But it is also very difficult for a person to paint a negative image. It’s easy enough to copy one if you have one in front of you.

In other words, an artist can look at the shroud and copy it but, you see, he is sort of cheating because he has a negative already made for him to copy. It’s harder to take a positive image and translate it into a negative, whereas my technique does it automatically. And then I would point out that the technique I used duplicates a number of these very particular flaws and peculiar characteristics, and whilst those might be imitated by a counterfeiter, the question would arise why would you put these particular distortions, faults and flaws in? Whereas the answer for me for my technique is because that’s what my technique does. It just naturally produces them – blank spaces for example.

SD: So you’re saying for instance that when a negative photograph is taken of the shroud image and gives an apparently positive image the fact that the beard and hair come out white is a natural function of just the way it has been done?

JN: Yes, you see when we look at an ordinary photographic negative we’re looking at colours like brown hair which is dark because of its colour. But when we make a rubbing from a bas-relief, that which is raised will be dark, regardless. So the hair becomes dark on the original image but light on the apparently positive photographic negative, so there is that reversal of form. Now it may be that an artist, since rubbings were beginning to become common during the middle ages, had studied some rubbings and then did a painting imitating them.

I would point out too that there is evidence that the shroud image was once much darker than it is now. So it does appear that the image is losing pigment over time and so the problem is that when we try to figure out exactly what the artist did there is so little left of the original painting or printing that all we have is a residual stain and that does complicate it. Plus the fact that skeptical people with artistic training have really not been allowed access to it.

SD: Given the results of the carbon dating that seem to indicate clearly that the shroud dates back to the 14th century and not the 1st century, and given your findings on a fairly convincing method by which the shroud may have been forged, do you think this will kill forever speculation about the authenticity of the shroud?

JN: Well, it’s difficult to say. There may be some really pathological believers who simply can’t accept what everyone else will be able to accept.

But when you look at the totality of the evidence, and you look at the age of the cloth, which is now apparently established with a very high degree of accuracy as the same time as the forger’s confession, and you realise that this is supported by the lack of historical record, the method of wrapping the body which is contrary to Jewish burial practice, and the evidence from the paint pigment, the fact is that although we may disagree slightly about the method of artistic simulation, the skeptics have maybe too many techniques on their side whereas the believers have none. And so the evidence is just overwhelming and if all issues were this clear, life would be much simpler.

Joe Nickell’s book is published by Prometheus and contains photographs of ‘shroud-like’ images produced by the author using the technique discussed in the interview.

Header image: a replica Shroud displayed in a Polish church. Photo by Krzysztof D., Flickr

From the archives: Heaven and Earth – Is the ‘curse of Tutankhamen’ a curse at all?

Mike Hutchinson
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From the archives: Heaven and Earth – Is the ‘curse of Tutankhamen’ a curse at all?

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 6, from 1988.

Some claims of the paranormal have been shown to be completely wrong; others, although unlikely and as yet unproven, may still have a small chance of being right. In the latter I include ESP, ghosts, life-after-death, UFO’s, and even dowsing. These phenomena are so ethereal that even if any of them exist they would be difficult to prove. That is surely the whole basis of our interest and skepticism. We believe that these things have not been proven in spite of the enormous amount of publicity and support given to them.

The former category includes astrology, iridology, palmistry, the Bermuda Triangle and any phenomenon which has rules or which has a base of checkable facts. These claims are easily looked into, and have been—many times. They consistently fail to support the claims made for them. Among these phenomena is one which is regularly mentioned by the media but which has received comparatively little skeptical comment: The Curse of Tutankhamen. I covered this briefly in my review of Time-Life’s awful series Mysteries of the Unknown (B&IS 11.4) and thought I would enlarge on it in this issue. The earliest and best skeptical article on the curse I can find was—not surprisingly perhaps—written by James Randi and appeared in The Humanist (March/April 1978).

The article was motivated by a television special on the curse and a popular book The Curse of the Pharaohs by Philipp Vandenberg. The first claim made by supporters of this myth is that a tablet with a curse inscribed on it was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb. It is supposed to have said: ‘Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the rest of the Pharaoh’, or similar depending upon the source. The tablet has since vanished, they tell us. But in reality there is no evidence that such a tablet ever existed. As in any archaeological dig all items found in the tomb were carefully noted and documented. No mention of such a tablet is made. Or are the archaeologists guilty of a cover-up?

We are asked to believe that the earliest victim of the curse was Lord Carnarvon, the patron of the expedition to find the tomb. When he died in Cairo, the lights of the city were reported to have gone out, and back in England at that very moment his favourite fox terrier ‘howled, sat up on her hind legs, and fell over dead’, as if in sympathy, or sorrow. As I mentioned in my previous review, Carnarvon was a sick man when he went to Egypt on his doctor’s advice. After recovering from a mosquito bite he contracted pneumonia and died one April morning at 1.55a.m. at the age of fifty-seven.

The lights often went out in Cairo, so it is no surprise that they did so at, or about the time Carnarvon died. As for the dog, at least one believer has reported Carnarvon’s son as saying that it died at 4a.m., which taking the two hour time difference between England and Egypt, meant that the dog died within five minutes of Carnarvon. Wrong! Even if the event occurred as stated (and why was there a witness with the healthy fox-terrier at four o’clock in the morning?). England was behind, not ahead, of Egyptian time.

As the ultimate penalty of a curse is death it is therefore not surprising that most of the tales in support of Tut’s curse involve the deaths of those who defiled the tomb. The odd thing though is how selective the curse is. It doesn’t seem to affect those closely involved in the opening of the tomb—as we shall see— so much as those who were on the side-lines. George Jay Gould, son of financier Jay Gould, is reported to have died within days of visiting the tomb. But he was just one of many thousands of tourists who have visited the tomb. Perhaps the curse thought that he had lived long enough for he died at the age of fifty-nine, which wasn’t too bad for the early twentieth century.

Another side-liner we are asked to believe is that a victim of the curse was Lord Westbury, the father of Howard Carter’s assistant Richard Bethell who died suddenly of a circulatory collapse some six years after the tomb opening. Grief stricken by his son’s death, Westbury committed suicide. Do curses have no compassion?

Randi checked Howard Carter’s writings and determined who had been most directly involved in the tomb discovery and exploration. Included in his Humanist article was a table listing the names of these people, the years of their deaths, their ages, and the number of years they survived the opening of the tomb in 1922. Some of Randi’s data was incomplete as he couldn’t trace details of all of the people in American libraries. I have therefore updated his list, and have calculated the average life-span and ‘curse survival’ rates of those whose ages we have been able to find.

Of the twenty-two people on the list we know the ages at death of eleven and the years in which another three were known to be alive. On average the eleven lived to at least 72, and all fourteen survived with a curse over their heads for almost twenty-five years each. The shortest and longest survival rates were, ironically, for two of the people present at the initial break-in of the tomb. Lord Carnarvon survived for only four months; his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert for fifty-eight years. She died in 1980, at the age of 79. The average survival rate of the twenty-two main participants was 20.9 years. As Randi wrote, ‘Perhaps we have here a beneficent curse that “inhibits” the Grim Reaper’.

But was there a curse in the first place? Not according to Carol Andrews, an Egyptologist from the British Museum, who said on LBC Radio in July 1988 that the idea of a curse probably dates from a Victorian novelist—Marie Corelli—who wrote ‘No good will come of disturbing Pharaoh’s bones… ’. But more directly, Andrews said that the Egyptians didn’t write curses in their tombs; she confirmed that no such curse was found in Tutankhamen’s tomb and that Egyptologists wouldn’t have expected to find one. She explained that the only curses made by the Egyptians were not against grave robbers but against anyone disturbing their funerary offerings of food and drink which were placed daily in chapels for their spirits to consume.

Although the general idea of a curse might have originated with a Victorian novelist, the Tutankhamen one certainly couldn’t—except by precognition, which we won’t address here. Nearer the truth is the suggestion that it was a story made up by newsmen. On 29 August 1980, the Daily Mail published an interview with ‘old soldier’ Richard Adamson, then 81 years old. As a military policeman in Egypt in 1922, Adamson was ordered to assist Carnarvon’s archaeological expedition to leave the Valley of the Kings. Before they could do so, the tomb was discovered and Adamson was to spend the next seven years actually sleeping in the tomb as a guard.

Adamson told the Daily Mail that as crowds were hampering the digging work and as they were also worried about the possibility of thieves coming in the night: ‘Quite suddenly we thought about a curse. Inscriptions laying curses on intruders had been found on the walls of tombs nearer Cairo and it so happened that a reporter had been hanging around, asking about curses. We saw no such inscriptions laying curses in Tut’s tomb, but let’s say we didn’t discourage him from thinking there was.’

Adamson’s story is possibly true, although his claim about curses on the walls of other tombs seems to contradict Carol Andrews. Perhaps these were curses against anyone disturbing the funerary offerings. Nevertheless, if there really is a curse, having lived to be at least 81 and surviving the curse by at least 58 years, Adamson only supports Randi’s suggestion that the curse is beneficent.

From the archives: Jacques Benoit’s (failed) experiments with telepathic snails

Toby Howard
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From the archives: Jacques Benoit’s (failed) experiments with telepathic snails

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 6, from 1988.

In 1850 a French inventor made a discovery he believed would revolutionise communications. With his insights the electric telegraph would become obsolete overnight. He predicted instantaneous communication around the globe — at the time an extraordinary idea, since wireless telegraphy would not be demonstrated by Marconi for another forty-five years. What made it all the more remarkable was that he had discovered the telepathic powers of the humble snail.

Jacques Toussaint Benoit was a character of his time. After a lifetime’s immersion in the occult, he was now on the verge of a breakthrough. Having observed the evolution of the new electric telegraph, he was aware there were problems. When in 1850 the first submarine cable was laid between England and France, the gutta-percha wire casings soon decomposed in the water, and contact with the brine rendered the wires useless. If electric telegraphy could not span the meagre English Channel, what hope was there for transatlantic communication?

Honoré Daumier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daumier_Progr%C3%A8s.jpg The letters above the snails read "Progrès," French for "progress." The caption reads "The snails aren't sympathetic."

What Benoit had in mind was a different force of nature, free from the trappings of gutta-percha and dry copper wires, a force that needed no conductor except the presence of living beings. He proposed to use animal magnetism. Benoit had recently discovered that two snails placed together, and subsequently separated, would remain forever united by a telepathic bond. When one was stimulated, an exchange of animal magnetism meant that the other, regardless of distance, also responded. Benoit had glimpsed the future of communication, and he was to be its pioneer.

Benoit was penniless, but he was charming. It was not long before he had persuaded Monsieur Triat, the manager of a Paris gymnasium, to be his angel. Benoit explained that he and his colleague, Monsieur Biat-Chrétien, then living in America, had hit upon a world-shaking idea. He assured Triat that he needed ‘only two or three bits of wood’ for the construction of his ‘snail-telegraph’, and that human communication would never be the same again.

At first, Triat believed absolutely in Benoit, providing him with lodgings and a steady allowance. Installed in his new Paris apartment Benoit set to work, but he soon became distracted, and people began to speculate that Triat’s money was funding more aspects of Benoit’s life than his snails.

When a year had passed, with Triat substantially out of pocket, and the snail-telegraph still unseen, Triat’s patience was gone. He demanded to see Benoit demonstrate the machine. Benoit stalled, but finally he agreed. With a grand title worthy of such a daring conception, the pasilalinic-sympathetic compass was unveiled.

It was a grand contraption indeed. At one end of Benoit’s apartment rested a huge wooden frame, a large horizontal disc suspended beneath. In the disc were twenty-four holes, each containing a zinc dish lined with a cloth soaked in copper sulphate solution. The cloth was fixed by a copper blade, and in the dish, secured by glue, sat a living snail. Against each dish was written a letter of the alphabet. To transmit the letter, the operator would touch the snail in the dish, causing a sympathetic reaction in the corresponding snail in the other half of the apparatus — a device of identical construction at the other end of the room.

Lack of space had forced Benoit to construct both stations of the telegraph in the same room, but as he readily explained — this was immaterial. Distance has no meaning for the telepathic snail — was not Benoit himself in daily ‘snail-telegraphic’ communication with his American collaborator? Full of confidence, Benoit invited Triat and Monsieur Allix, a journalist from La Presse, to a demonstration of the machine.

On the morning of 2 October 1851, the demonstration began, but at once Triat and Allix objected to the location of the instruments. Could they not at least be separated with a curtain? Alas, replied Benoit, that would not be technically possible.

Nevertheless, Triat took his place at the controls of one of the stations, and began to prod the snails to spell out his message. Benoit was supposed to remain at his receiving station on the other side of the room, but found it essential to cross between the machines on one pretext or another.

Triat was now certain of what he had begun to suspect in the recent months. Benoit was a rogue, and he had been hoaxed, a witness to nothing better than farce. Allix, on the other hand, was completely convinced. On 27 October a glowing article appeared in La Presse: “…snails which have once been put in contact, are always in sympathetic communication. When separated, there disengages itself from them a species of fluid of which the earth is the conductor, which develops and unrolls, so to speak, like the almost invisible thread of the spider, [but] the thread of the escargotic fluid is invisible as completely and the pulsation along it as rapid as the electric fluid.”

Now skeptical, Triat demanded another test, this time with strict controls. Benoit agreed, and a date was set. But when the day came, Benoit had vanished.

In the following months Monsieur Benoit was seen wandering the Paris streets, destitute and deranged. He died two years later, and with him disappeared forever the dream of the snail-telegraph.

From the archives: A dowsing-dedicated day in the country

Denys Parsons
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From the archives: A dowsing-dedicated day in the country

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 5, from 1988.

Mike Hutchinson alerted me to the intention of BBC Oxford to do a feature on dowsing on the afternoon of 14 July 1988. According to the Radio Times, listeners were “to take part in some rather unusual field experiments this week using the much-derided but usually accurate skills of water divining.”

I telephoned the presenter/producer, David Freeman, and asked if anybody of a critical turn of mind was to be present. He replied “Oh, Michael Shallis, the dowser is ‘proper’ – he has a PhD in physics.”

Anyhow, I was invited to attend on the day. Dr Michael Shallis, a lecturer in physical sciences in the Department of External Studies in Oxford, was quoted in the Radio Times as saying, “Anyone can dowse or map dowse, providing they are guided by someone who knows what they are doing.”

In turn I alerted the Oxford Mail and hydrogeologists at the Institute of Hydrology at Wallingford, but neither sent observers.

Mike and I reported at midday at Radio Oxford, 242 Banbury Road – ‘over Allied Carpets’ we had been told, and it was! Waiting to join the party were a couple of BBC television producers who had come to investigate whether there might be a programme in this for them later on, and also Nicholas Booth, who had written a book on Mars, and who worked for the journal Astronomy Now – what has that to do with dowsing, I asked. Nothing, he was just going to talk about his book on the programme. The venue for the programme was the village of Binsey on the outskirts of Oxford and we drove out there with the astronomer and a girl physics student, who was interested in the subject.

We had a snack at a pub named The Perch and there we were introduced to Dr Shallis, and the programme started promptly at 1:10 pm with the presenter’s microphone linked to an estate car fitted with a five metre high radio mast. The announcement of the dowsing item had attracted a handful of spectators including a member of the British Society of Dowsers, whom I shall call Bridget.

Attention centred on a low electric cattle fence. Dr Shallis issued angled dowsing rods made from clothes hangers to sundry volunteers. They were told that the fence current was switched off and Dr Shallis showed that the rods gave no reaction (did not cross over each other) above the electric wire. A few minutes later the presenter’s secretary, Anne, announced that the farmer had switched the current on. Why did you tell them, I asked; now they will all get the dowsing reaction, and they did. Anne explained that she was concerned about the party receiving electric shocks, which was understandable. Well, I suggested, now ask the farmer to switch off without telling the dowsers and see what happens. She said she could not tell the farmer what to do.

A white man is photographed standing with his hands fowards and close to his chest, grasping a dowsing rod in each hand - the rods are crossed. He's wearing a rain jacket and standing on the gradd, with a light blue sweater under his coat.
Ghost dowsing rods – Riverside Cemetery. Photo by Tim Evanson, via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Meanwhile it was a joy to watch the brilliant way in which David Freeman kept the show running in a lively manner. The whole programme, from 1:10 to 3:30 pm, was entirely unplanned and unscripted. David rushed all over the place with his microphone, keeping up a constant commentary but frequently drawing in spectators, including myself, for comments on what had happened so far. “Now we’ll have a short break for music,” he would say at intervals, or “Now Nicholas Booth is going to tell us about his book on Mars.”

The next dowsing item was a search for keys. Nicholas hid his bunch of keys somewhere in a tufty patch of rough grass, a patch forming a triangle with sides of about 20 metres. Shallis walked slowly over this patch for 20 minutes without finding the keys, but Mike and I noticed that his rods frequently crossed and he would look down and disturb tufts of grass with his foot.

Meanwhile Bridget from the British Society of Dowsers was really stealing Shallis’ thunder and almost monopolising the microphone. “Dowsing is entirely a matter of sympathy,” she said more than once. At the end of the abortive search for the keys, David Freeman said into the microphone, “Well, that seems to prove what Denys Parsons said earlier, that dowsing does not work.”

I intervened to say “No, that’s going too far. You can’t condemn a man on the basis of one failure. Anyhow Michael Shallis classed this part of the programme as a ‘game’, which it is. For a proper test of dowsing you need a long series of double blind tests.”

“Now it’s time for Dick to tell us about mountain biking, and he’s brought along several models to demonstrate.” Most of us were shivering by this time and those wise enough to have brought them donned anoraks and the like. Next David announced we would attempt some map dowsing. This was the signal for the rain to pelt down with some force. The dowsers and David climbed into the van that had brought the bicycles, and the rest of us huddled together at the tailgate under umbrellas.

Shallis announced that he had prepared two maps, a genuine map and an imaginary map. On the real map he had dowsed a real well, and on the imaginary map he had dowsed an imaginary well. In both cases, he said, recent tests with more than 100 of his students had shown that a fair number had indicated each well on the same square of the 40-square map, a 1 in 40 chance, and the odds against this degree of success were 47,000 to 1.

Here I made the point, on the air, that psychologists and magicians were familiar with the fact that, when asked to pinpoint an area in a pattern of objects, many people would go for the same part of the design – for example, nobody chooses the corner squares or the centre squares. This remark was backed up by Nicholas, the astronomer, who was also asked to comment. Volunteers in the van, however, who tried the map dowsing, did not seem to be able to locate the correct squares.

After the broadcast was over I had a short conversation with Shallis. I said that surely the only way to test a phenomenon such as dowsing was to tot up successes against failures. He replied, “Not necessarily. After all the discovery of a single meteorite showed that meteorites existed.” I could not quite follow the logic of this reply.

At around 4 pm, Mike and I, slightly damp, made our way back to London. We agreed it had all been ‘good clean fun’, but we realised that our small contribution had been only a drop in the ocean of determined credulity of dowsers, the general public, and indeed the media.

From the archives: Astrology, Gauquelin and the real explanation for the “Mars Effect”

Anthony Garrett
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From the archives: Astrology, Gauquelin and the real explanation for the “Mars Effect”

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 5, from 1988.

Some years ago Michel Gauquelin, for many years skeptical, suggested that astrology was validated by findings on top European sportsmen and women. In Gauquelin’s sample of sports stars, the planet Mars lay in two particular sectors of the birth chart more often (22% of the time) than for random samples of the population (17%). This observation is the central plank of a new book, irresponsibly entitled Astrology: the Evidence of Science, by Percy Seymour, a professional astronomer.1

CSICOP confirmed these facts, though the effect was not clear in a later test of US sports stars.1 CSICOP pointed out that the ‘Mars effect’ could arise from a biased sample containing an undue proportion of sports stars showing the effect.2 CSICOP stopped short of accusing Gauquelin of fraud, although that is the only way to choose a sample to get a predetermined result. Perhaps independent criteria of performance for defining ‘top sports people’ will be agreed on, and Gauquelin’s sample checked for bias. If it is unbiased, should we then embrace astrology?

An image of the planet Mars floating in the black of space, around half of the planet is lit and visible from the top-right
Mars, the ‘red’ planet – image via Pixabay

The answer is a resounding no. We shall present plausible alternative ways in which the results could have arisen. First, what Gauquelin means by ‘astrology’ presents a moving target: when the US results were negative, Gauquelin suggested that the qualifying standards were set too low. If he wished, he might next claim it works only for particular subdisciplines, more heavily represented in the European sample, and so on. But astrology makes no claims to apply only to top European sportsmen and women. Far from it: its practitioners set great store by its universal validity. They accept that astrology is empirical, positing no mechanisms; this is a tenable position, if unenquiring.

Moreover, astrologers do not claim that Mars lying in Gauquelin’s sectors leads to sporting prowess. So whatever Gauquelin is testing, it isn’t astrology. It cannot be ruled out that a single planet affects only top European sports stars, but a mechanism which does this and nothing else is utterly implausible, except apparently to Gauquelin (who already concedes that half the planets do nothing). Astrologers approve of Gauquelin only because his results seemingly indicate some sort of planetary effect. But astrology has already been conclusively disposed of, in a double-blind test conducted with the cooperation of leading astrologers.3

Statistical results which deviate from chance can be viewed either as freaks or as evidence for a systematic effect. The choice can only be made on the basis of prior information, and without it nothing more can be done, no further tests proposed. We should therefore ask Gauquelin: on what grounds does he believe that the Mars/European sports stars effect is real, rather than a chance result? What information, known only to him, makes him prefer this alternative?

It is also worth asking how Gauquelin came to select this particular profession and planet, and these particular birth chart sectors. Many professions might have been examined, and one showing a strong effect, which turned out to be European Sports Stars, presented without mention of the rest. Alternatively, a secret hunt for correlations between planets and sectors of sports stars’ birth charts could have led to the choices of Mars, and of sectors.

These suggestions involve fraud. I am not suggesting Gauquelin cheated; he could perfectly well have found his results by chance, and be mystified by their cause. But the skeptic, sensibly, will want to check this. To do so, planet-sector correlations must be tested. If Gauquelin’s choices correspond to one of the largest correlations, we can reasonably cry ‘foul!’. This is the test which is crying out to be done, rather than a check of whether Gauquelin chose his sportsmen and women fairly.

We should also ask: on what grounds does Gauquelin posit a correlation between sporting ability and the Mars effect? He is adamant about this. What secret information led him to suggest it? These questions demand answers.

References

  1. Percy Seymour, Astrology: the Evidence of Science. Lennard Publishing, 1988.
  2. The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 19-63 (Winter 1 979-80), and Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 77-82 (Spring 1983), and further references therein.
  3. S. Carlson; Nature , Vol. 318, p. 419 (5 December 1985).

From the archives: Is there antibody there? Jaques Benveniste and the memory of water

Richard Kay
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From the archives: Is there antibody there? Jaques Benveniste and the memory of water

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 5, from 1988.

There has recently been quite a controversy in the scientific press which involves this very question. An article by Dr Jaques Benveniste and his colleagues (Nature vol. 333, June 1988) claimed that solutions which statistically did not contain any antibodies (‘solute-free solutions’) still retained the activity of the antibody that had once been dissolved in them.

The claims surround a model which has been used to study allergic disease activity in vitro. This model involves a specialised type of white blood cell called the mast cell. In people with allergic disease, such as hay fever or certain types of asthma, this cell is coated with allergy-mediating antibodies called immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short. When two or more of these antibodies are cross-linked on the mast cell surface (usually by the substance, called the allergin, that the patient is allergic to) they cause the mast cell to release certain chemicals stored in granules inside the cell. Histamine is the most notable of these, causing many allergic symptoms such as watery eyes, sneezing, itching and so on. This is why allergic diseases are sometimes treated by anti-histamine therapy.

Basophils work in the same way as mast cells and can be easily isolated from blood, forming a suitable way to study allergy in the test tube. Instead of an allergen, antibodies directed against IgE (anti-IgE) can be used to cross-link surface IgE molecules and cause basophil granules to be released experimentally. In addition to measuring histamine release, which is technically quite difficult, granule release can also be measured by staining the cells. Cells which contain granules stain red, but those that have released their chemical packets are colourless, providing a simple means to quantify allergy (and its treatment) in vitro.

The controversy surrounding this affair stems from Benveniste’s attempts to answer the question ‘How little anti-IgE is necessary to cause basophil granule release?’, or rather the answer that these experiments provided. He obtained a solution of anti-IgE antibodies and diluted them in successive ten-fold dilutions. As one would expect, the more he diluted them the weaker their activity became, until finally they caused no more granule release than that observed when the cells were put in diluent only.

However, Benveniste continued to dilute the antibody solution still further, and to his surprise (and that of many others), the capacity to cause basophil degranulation recurred. As he diluted still further this capacity disappeared and then reappeared in cyclical fashion down to a dilution of 10140 when the last maxima of release was noted. This means he was observing the effect of the original antibody many millions of times after the last antibody should have been diluted out and lost. Put simply, a solution that statistically no longer contained antibody exhibited antibody activity.

This was not the only claim made in this extremely bold paper. He claimed that this effect could occur with other substances besides antibodies, that the effect depended on the nature of the diluent (it had to be polar) not the initial substance diluted, and, most important of all, the diluent had to be vortexed violently for at least 12 seconds for this effect to be transferred. This practice is commonly used by homeopaths when they dilute their substances, and they also claim it is fundamental to the efficacy of their treatments.

So astonished were the editors of Nature that they only agreed to publish these results if they could be ratified by other laboratories, and if the author would agree to an examination of the technique in practice by a team of ‘specialists’ of their own choosing (which turned out to include James Randi). The experiments were repeated by six other laboratories in four different countries and all confirmed the original findings, and so subject to an independent examination and with several disclaimers the article was published.

Approximately four weeks later, Nature printed the independent investigation results pronouncing the ‘High-dilution experiments a delusion’ and reported that the ‘phenomenon described’ was ‘not reproducible in the ordinary meaning of that word.’

The crux of their decision was that the trial had not been designed properly. First of all the experiments were not properly ‘blinded,’ and in experiments where adequate blinding had taken place the results were always negative (three times). In other words the experimenter who read the results (which are subjectively interpretative) knew in advance which tubes contained which dilution and could therefore have been influenced in her findings. When she did not know this information her findings were negative.

Secondly, Benveniste had chosen not to take account of those times that the experiment did not work. There were also claims that the sampling procedure was not adequate, leaving the experiment open to sampling error.

Finally, Benveniste’s results were ‘too perfect’. In his control experiments where cells were treated with water alone they should not degranulate except spontaneously. The published results reflected this with a release rate of 0-30%. However, as both the pre- and post-treatment cell numbers were counted by eye, one would expect that on some occasions more cells would be counted as staining red after the treatment than there were before – i.e., there should be some negative figures. The fact that there were not suggests that some ‘massaging’ of the data took place.

Nature obviously allowed Dr Benveniste the last say in the matter, and unfortunately his reply was acrimonious to say the least. He obviously felt that he had been the subject of a ‘witch-hunt’ where certain demands he had made had not been complied with, and that the principal worker had been forced to carry out an excessive workload in an unsatisfactory atmosphere of distrust which precluded her normal functioning. His argument maintains that this phenomenon is so impossible that it should never occur at all, and that if it only occurs one quarter of the time that this experiment is still worthy of further study. He further claims that if all unusual research is subjected to this torrent of abuse by the ‘orthodoxy’, then no original thought will ever come out of recognised scientific establishments.

Clearly, all of this leaves much to be desired. The most satisfactory course of events would have been to explain this phenomenon without recourse to experimental design or statistical methodology, either of which implies incompetence or dishonesty on the part of the experimenter. Jacques Benveniste is an accomplished scientist with an international reputation, and has nothing to gain by making spurious claims. However, if an experiment is poorly designed, subject to observer bias (however unintentional), and not repeatable then clearly there is no ‘result’ to explain.

The problem lies in that this does nothing to resolve the continuing conflict between homeopathic practitioners and ‘established’ medicine. Homeopaths will clearly feel that the major issues raised by this paper have not been addressed, ie that substances diluted far beyond a pharmacological dose can still exhibit specific activity and the retraction will be held as yet another example of a ‘hatchet job’ by the unenlightened. Furthermore, I, in common with many colleagues, consider that Nature had no right to publish a paper which they clearly believed to be untrue from the very start. This unfortunately appears to be an attempt to create sensationalism at Benveniste’s expense, and serves only to trivialise the issues that such research raises.

The original paper and the subsequent retraction have caused considerable reaction in both the scientific and lay press, and accusations, implications and conclusions have been flying wildly about. What is clear is that the story will not end here, and that Benveniste’s work neither proves nor disproves the principles behind homeopathy.

For my part, I would only say that this data is still too speculative and unproven to be used as validation (for which it will most certainly be quoted) of scientifically unproven claims.

From the archives: A historical Dutch UFO hunt – How one phone call roused all Amsterdam

Marcel Hulspas
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From the archives: A historical Dutch UFO hunt – How one phone call roused all Amsterdam

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 2, Issue 5, from 1988.

The precise happenings of the evening of 3 March 1988 cannot be reconstructed any more. The Amsterdam municipal police, the RLD (State Service for Aeronautics), and the personnel of the traffic tower at Schiphol (Amsterdam airport) don’t like to go into the matter any further. Things got completely out of hand. How could it come to this? A reconstruction of that chaotic evening follows.

It all started with a call at around 9:30pm to Schiphol’s air traffic control tower. Someone (the name and address were not taken down) had seen a formation of strange lights, and wanted to know whether the personnel at Schiphol had seen them, too. Indeed, three lights oscillated in the north-northeast, over Sloten, seemingly right above the apartment buildings. The radar people, one floor below, were asked whether they had seen anything, but they hadn’t.

Schiphol has three radar systems: a ground radar with a reach of 5km, an approach radar APP, with a reach of about 60km, and the Area Control Center, with a reach of 280-350 km, depending on atmospheric conditions. Probably reconfirmation was requested by APP because an approaching plane was suspected. Nothing can be said about the telephone call. The tower observations can be explained. ACC said visibility was excellent at that moment, maybe 400km, and at the time an airliner was passing Helgoland (200km). Possibly this was what was seen. Tower personnel saw the lights go north, slowly, oscillating. Oscillation can be explained as an effect of atmospheric refraction. The airplane was too far away for APP-radar. It must be considered impossible for tower personnel to confuse local stationary lights or stars with UFOs.

Mr Van Solingen, head of the traffic control centre, decided to call in the RPDL (State Police Department of Aeronautics) at 9:45pm. RPDL didn’t know what to do with the story, and asked tower personnel, after some internal consultation, whether the unexplained lights were still visible.

Tower personnel looked again, and again saw something (no details are known about this second sighting, so no explanation can be given. Possibly it was the same aeroplane mentioned above). No radar confirmation being given, the RPDL commander concluded that it was a small, local phenomenon. He decided to inform local police departments (State and municipal) through INRAP, the interregional police radio network. (Note that communications through this network cannot be monitored by civilians, but local police radio can. INRAP is intended for use during disasters in and around the airport.) The RPDL commander asked that local police be on alert for the cause of the lights. Police stations relayed this request via radio to surveillance cars. Now all fences were down, because lots of Amsterdam residents monitor police radio, and many started their own investigations.

To top it all off, the national press service, ANP, also listens to police radio channels, and shortly after 10pm, the Schiphol UFOs were already on the Teletekst news. One half hour after the first innocent report, dozens of Amsterdam people were already hunting enthusiastically for UFOs. The sky was scanned with binoculars, police cars were pursued in the supposition that they were headed for the UFO, and lots of dramatic reports were phoned in. Schiphol, the police stations and newspaper editors were overwhelmed with reports and requests for information.

The main police station information centre only knew that a mysterious light was flying back and forth over the town. Many reports mentioned ‘lights in the west’, but some stories were very complex.

A glass-fronted entrance to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam
Schiphol airport. By Andrew Nash on Flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0

Tower personnel can be considered trained observers, but ordinary policemen and civilians cannot. On that evening, Venus and Jupiter were very bright in the wester sky, and also very close together. Many reports were probably due to this pair of planets. Probably lots of fantasy reports must have been called in as well. Neither Schiphol, nor the RPDL, nor the Amsterdam police took down the names and addresses of witnesses. No one has come forward with photographic evidence or films, etc.

The stream of reports continued (10:30pm), and the Amsterdam municipal police asked RPDL to let a helicopter investigate. This request was turned down-people would only get even more excited.

For the police in the surveillance cars, the whole affair was an entertaining break in their otherwise dreary routine. They kept each other informed through police radio of the latest news. Lots of Amsterdam people listened in on that, and phoned in their comments. A police station in the north of Amsterdam reported little green men checking in at the desk. Other cops took their task seriously, and tried to track down the sources of the stories. The main office found out that the lamps on the NISSAN terminal could be seen from a large distance.

The NISSAN terminal in the western harbour was unloading the ‘Hual Trapper’. Seen from Schiphol, this is directly behind Sloten. Normal area lighting has been functioning for 14 years, and the large cranes there carry lamps which are used regularly. The ship also has searchlights, and possibly one of them, directed upwards, gave striking light effects.

The police considered that this light was the cause of the reports from that moment on. Journalists asking for information were only told that the UFOs were explained, and they were not satisfied. The press got the impression that the police didn’t know what to do. Reports kept coming in from all sides, and also from out of town. It was altogether implausible that Schiphol’s tower personnel mistook cranes for UFOs.

Schiphol air traffic control still didn’t know what they had seen, but they believe that many people had mistaken NISSAN lights for UFOs. Traffic control asked NISSAN to turn the lights off to calm down the excitement. NISSAN refused: they were still working. Meanwhile, the municipal police were getting fed up with all the reports, and also with the press’s questions. They decided on a tour de force.

RPDL got another (this time urgent) request to send up a helicopter to identify the UFSs.

At ten minutes past midnight, their request was granted. The helicopter crew reported that the NISSAN cranes are the only bright object in the western harbour. The helicopter (generating a couple of new UFO reports) flew low down over the NISSAN area, and returned t o base after 40 minutes. The city police considered this the end of the affair.

Most journalists couldn’t see any pattern in the reports either, and agreed with the police interpretation of the facts. At about 1am, the telephone reports stopped. Everyone was confused, and had a hungover feeling. The Telegraaf newspaper found the whole affair interesting enough to give it a large spread on the front page the next morning.

This story was as confusing as the events of the previous evening. As a reaction, SKEPSIS chairman Prof. de Jager sent a press statement to ANP, explaining that the coincidence of Venus and Jupiter may have generated many reports. From this reconstruction, it is clear that Jupiter and Venus can explain some or many civilian reports, but not the first reports from the traffic tower at Schiphol. During the day, Friday 4 March, Prof. de Jager’s explanation was accepted as a complete one – an understandable, but regrettable, simplification.

This article originally appeared in SKEPTER, the magazine of the Dutch skeptical group.

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