Fighting parliamentary committees...with your mind

You might remember me writing about the Intention Experiment in the past. The Intention Experiment hopes to harness the power of positive thinking to influence events. In one memorable example, they tried to influence the structure of water through the collected brainpower of a large collection of gullible numpties. Despite the experiment having a design likely to massively increase the chance of getting a false positive result, nothing astonishing happened.

Gimpy has now made my day by posting this story about homeopaths concerned that the British parliament's Science and Technology Committee will conclude that there is no evidence in favour of homeopathy. Instead of marshalling the evidence and trying to make a scientific case, the homeopaths are trying an intention experiment to influence the committee in favour of homeopathy.

There's just nothing to add to this: it's shear barking mad lunacy, and you have to think that maybe these people are their own worst enemies.

More intention experiment: the ghost of Benveniste

I should probably avoid the Intention Experiment website, but it's such a fabulous compendium of nonsense and loony ideas that it's hard to leave alone. Now they're channeling the ghost of Jaques Benveniste. As many will know, Benveniste caused a storm of controversy when his lab published a paper in Nature that appeared to show that homeopathic concentrations of a certain type of antibody could have a biological effect, even though the chances of the solution containing any actual molecules of the antibody were tiny. This is the basis of the idea of 'memory of water' in homeopathy. The Nature paper was published with an unprecedented "editorial reservation", and a team assembled by Nature visited the Benveniste lab to look into the results. The results of the investigation were damning, showing that the design of the experiments was poor, and an article outlining the problems was published in a later issue of Nature. Ever since, homeopaths and other brands of quacks have been convinced that Benveniste's results were suppressed by the scientific establishment on behalf of Big Pharma, and so on.

Benveniste, however, was not put off by this setback, and continued in his work, going on to suggest that not only did the 'memory of water' effect exist, but that it could be transmitted digitally, down phone lines or over the internet. Brilliantly, this only gave 'positive' results when the equipment was being run by a particular researcher. Benveniste doesn't seem to have reflected too hard on why that might have been the case. Benveniste called this "digital biology", which would have "immense consequences on medical diagnostic procedures and the agro-food industry, with huge technological and commercial impact", and was only being held back because scientists are "opposed to the evolution of science". You recognise the narrative here, don't you?

Why do I mention all this? Because the Intention Experiment blog carries news of an experiment into "healing by e-mail". Apparently, a "Francesca McCarney, Ph.D., teacher of professional intuitives at the Academy of Intuitive Studies and Intuition Medicine" conducted the experiment, where 88 people were each sent 2 e-mails. One of these e-mails had "healing energy" "encapsulated" into it, and the other one did not. Apparently, the e-mails were indentified correctly 31.9% of the time, against a 25% probablity of getting them right by chance. This seems like a deeply unimpressive result, with no confidence interval to give us an idea of how likely it would be for such a result to occur by chance, but we're told that "scientists would consider it highly significant result" [sic]. We also don't know whether there might inadvertently have been clues in the text of the e-mails.

It seems that loony ideas never die; they just re-appear periodically in a slightly different form.

A lesson in how to get a false positive result

Back to Rustum Roy and his ongoing attempt to show that water can have a 'healing' structure (whatever that means) imposed on it by the power of human intention. As Le Canard Noir said, in the comments to a previous post, this is car crash science. Although I know I should look away, I can't quite manage to do it.

Previously, Roy and his team tried to show that the Raman spectrum of a beaker of water could be changed merely by people all over the world thinking about it changing. Despite the horrible design of the experiment, the results were inconclusive. What Roy needs is a way of increasing the chances of getting a positive result. Another experiment is now planned, details of which are beginning to emerge at the Intention Experiment blog:

As you remember, our experiment isn’t conclusive – largely because we’re only looking at one parameter to see if it has changes.

This is a little like looking at an elephant from one side. If you look from the front, you will mainly see a trunk. Look from bottom, and you only see a giant mass hovering over you like a dark grey cloud.

Rainen’s new equipment consists of three separate devices that examine, respectively, the light scattering, the thermal expansion and any infrared changes in a sample of water. Once these measurements are taken, they are sent into a computer, and from this handful of data points, the computer can determine some 1000 parameters of the sample.

“This equipment represents a revolution in characterizing water,” says Roy.

From this, it sounds as though Roy and team are going to be comparing 1,000 variables. This raises the issue of multiple comparisons. If you compare 1,000 variables between two populations, using a hypothesis test at the 5% level, you would expect to get 'positive' results for 50 of the variables, even if there was no real difference between the two populations. Statisticians apply corrections to account for this effect. Since Roy's team have previously published a paper that purported to show differences between graphs without applying any statistical analysis at all, it's not certain that this will be done. Another issue is that these 1,000 parameters are derived from 'a handful' of measurements, so they presumably cannot be independent parameters. It seems that false positive results are much more likely from the new experiment. Result!

The intention experiment cargo cult: results are in!

You remember Rustum Roy and his attempts to measure changes in water structure caused by people all over the world really, really wanting the structure to change? Yes, the results are in! There's good news and bad news. First the good news: apparently "something happened", but the bad news is that "we're not sure what".

The intention experiment failed to change the structure of water. I'm quite surprised, actually. My prediction that they would find some changes in the water because it was such a poorly designed experiment has not come true. The sample "had enormous variation in light scattering to begin with", but there were no profound changes recorded. I would suggest that the variation is probably instrumental noise, but no actual results have been shown, so it would be impossible to tell even if I knew much about Raman spectroscopy.

Why did the best intentions of so many people fail? You might say "because trying to change water structure through the power of the mind doesn't work". And, to be fair, the intention experiment people have this eighth on their list of possibilities. Because "Although all of our other studies have produced a measurable effect, this hypothesis must always be considered". But not considered that seriously, you understand.

What could the other reasons be? The wildest one is the suggestion that "intention works out of time" (which I suppose is no dafter than imagining that intention works in the first place). Of course, here any recorded change in the water whatsoever, at any time, could be attributed to 'intention', so this isn't what you would call testable. Other suggestions include water purity (even the purest water is grossly contaminated, and having it sat on a lab bench with a probe in it is not going to help), environmental factors (a thunderstorm during the measurement), and problems with the experimental protocol. So the experiment will be repeated in a couple of months.

Some of the comments are fun. One commenter writes "This is what experimentation is all about. You just keep trying until you can verify your conclusions...". Another writes "I'm convinced that intention works. I don't see the need for further experiments". It seems that any negative result would have to be wrong, because we all know that it works. This is how homeopaths think, and is pretty much exactly what is meant by cargo-cult science.

It's worth remembering, of course, that all of this is based on Rustum Roy's evidence-free assertions that there is such a thing as 'healing water', that 'healing water' has a different structure from ordinary water, and that you can change the structure of water by thinking about it. Obviously it would be nice to really, really want a beaker of water to cure cancer, and have it work, but I think it might be worth persevering with proper biomedical research for now.

Rustum Roy's intention experiment: we are all Qigong masters

Apparently, Manju Rao and Rustum Roy are busily working on the results from their Intention Experiment, where people all over the world concentrated on changing the Raman spectrum of a beaker of water. However, some preliminary results are filtering out for our entertainment.

According to the Intention Experiment blog, "Although the scientists are not finished examining their data, they have told me one thing: they’ve seen results they’ve never seen before with their equipment". This suggests to me that there was a problem with the experimental set-up, which of course has not been described in any detail.

Then "One reason it is taking so long is that our water had a great deal of variation an hour before the experiment was run. This could mean that our anticipation of the event began to affect the water. Or it could mean that our hypothesis is wrong. Or it could mean that with intention, we are emanating an energy like a Qigong master, which is being picked up by the spectroscopy before the event". Or could it mean that the impurities in the water are changing through time as it sits in an open beaker on a lab bench? Obviously, emanating energy like a Qigong master is a much more plausible explanation, but might it not be a good idea to control the experiment just in case? Also, looking at Rao and Roy's previous work on homeopathic remedies, it seems that 'stray light is eliminated by turning off all the room lights whenever data are being collected'. Unless they are in a proper darkroom, that isn't going to be enough to keep out all the ambient light. Raman is also noisy and highly sensitive to impurities.

There's also some weirdness going on here, as this page talks about taking a Raman spectrum with the 'laser turned off'. With the laser off, there is no incident beam to undergo Raman scattering, so I'm simply not clear what they could be talking about here at all. A 'member of the Penn State team' also says that "The laser light is absorbed by the water molecules, depending on how they are energetically configured or arranged, and then reradiated at a different wavelength". As I understand it, this isn't quite right: the incident beam is scattered, with a wavelength shift of the scattered beam. There is no absorption and re-radiation in Raman scattering. Do the Penn State team have any idea what they're doing?

I can't wait for the final results...

More water-related nonsense from Rustum Roy

Regular readers will remember a recent paper involving Rustum Roy, a materials science professor at Penn State, that purported to show that you could use UV-VIS and Raman spectroscopy to distinguish different homeopathic remedies. Given that the homeopathic remedies were at a 30c 'potency' (that is, a dilution factor of 1x10^60, a one followed by sixty zeroes), the chance of any molecules of the active ingredient remaining are vanishingly small, and this seemed an extremely unlikely claim. Sure enough, on looking at the paper, it's riddled with basic errors, including duplicated graphs, and doesn't support the conclusions of the authors. A group of sceptical scientists, including me, wrote a letter to the journal's editor about the paper. The authors offered a totally inadequate response that failed to address any of the serious problems with the paper.

Fortunately, Roy has not been discouraged by this setback. He is now involved in an experiment that attempts to show that we can change the structure of water with our minds. There are some truly astounding statements by Roy here.

Structured water is found in the cytoplasm of healthy tissues and it is characterized by having a high solubility for body minerals. It is also found in healing waters. This appears to be the structure shared by very different healing waters from some healing spas to silver aquasols used worldwide.

Structured waters have been produced using various forms of energy, such as light, sound, heat, pressure and radiation.

In our proposed experiment, we aim to examine whether we can structure water with intention alone. We’ll be monitoring any change against control using analytical tools such as spectroscopy.

As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that 'healing waters' actually do any healing, and there is no evidence that different structures of water have different biological effects. But why worry about that? Why not set up a badly designed experiment anyway?

What Roy is proposing to do is get a beaker of water, and collect a Raman spectrum of it. Raman spectroscopy is a technique that can identify vibrational and rotational modes in a system. It can be used to detect changes in chemical bonding, which is what Roy will be looking for. Then people all over the world are going to concentrate on changing the Raman spectrum of the beaker of water. Roy will then collect a new Raman spectrum, and compare it to the old one. This is going to happen on April 26th.

The main problem I can see with this is that the experiment is totally uncontrolled. A beaker of water sitting around is going to dissolve gases and incorporate dust, particulates, skin cells and so on from the atmosphere surrounding it. It might also lose some of the dissolved gases in it to the atmosphere through time. Roy is apparently making no attempt to control for this at all.

Roy's previous work doesn't exactly give cause for confidence. The paper in Homeopathy claims to show differences in Raman spectra between homeopathic remedies. Essentially, all the paper does is present graphs, state that they look different, and leave it at that. There is no attempt to understand why the graphs might be different, or assign peaks to distinct vibrational/rotational modes, or show that the differences between the spectra are statistically significant, or anything.

I think I can confidently predict that the second spectrum will look subtly different from the first, and Roy will declare that we can change water structure with the power of our minds alone. The experiment will be totally worthless, but that won't stop people citing it for years to come as cast-iron evidence for telekinesis.