Xref: utzoo sci.bio:1344 sci.misc:2084 sci.research:416 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!husc6!uwvax!speedy!mayo From: mayo@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Bob Mayo) Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.misc,sci.research Subject: Re: Strange results in Nature article Message-ID: <6042@spool.cs.wisc.edu> Date: 23 Jul 88 04:21:49 GMT References: <10465@lll-winken.llnl.gov> <20850@beta.lanl.gov> Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu Reply-To: mayo@speedy.cs.wisc.edu (Bob Mayo) Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept Lines: 35 In article <10465@lll-winken.llnl.gov> colvin@mahler.llnl.gov.UUCP (Mike Colvin) writes: ] ] Has anyone read in the newsgroup read the article: "Human basophil ] degranulation triggered by very dilute antiserum against IgE" in ] the June 30 Nature on page 816? It's also discussed in an editorial ] entitled "When to Believe the Unbelievable" on page 787 of the same issue. ] [...] ] The authors have no ] explaination but hypothesize that the antibody is somehow leaving its ] "imprint" on the water molecules, but this explaination is unsatisfactory ] for many reasons. One thing which struck me as odd is that they aren't diluting with water. See the "methods" section in Figure 1. The solution used for dilution contains NaCl, KCl, HEPES, EDTA-Na4, glucose, heuman serum albumin (HSA), and heparin). I don't know what all of these are, but it seems like a complex organic soup to me. I would think that no great leap is required to hypothesize that the IgE anitserum catalyzed an as-yet-undiscovered reaction in this stuff. And perhaps once the reaction gets going it doesn't really need IgE to be around so dilution has no effect. But the authors and nature hypothesize changes in the state of water molecules, etc.. I am missing something? Shouldn't we look at the complex organic stuff before hypothesizing more radical things such as changes in the state of water? --Bob Mayo P.S. I know nothing about immunology and biochemistry. Please correct me if my statements are wrong.