Pseudoscience moving into the mainstream

The death of magician and debunker of frauds James Randi was a reminder that even pseudoscience and charlatanry used to come from a kinder world. Randi’s arch-antagonist was the ‘psychic’ Uri Geller, who always seemed to be on 1970s chat shows bending spoons with the power of his mind. I came across Randi (and witnessed a demonstration of his stage magic) while working for Nature after the journal had just published the notorious ‘memory of water’ paper by French immunologist Jacques Benveniste. The editor enlisted the magician to join the team that travelled to the French labs to witness a (failed) attempt to replicate the studies in which a biological molecule was said to retain its activity after being diluted to the point of total absence.

That is now seen as one of the classic examples of pathological science, joining the likes of the polywater affair of the late 1960s and the cold fusion episode of 1989. Polywater – an alleged new form of water, with the consistency of soft wax – was straightforwardly disproved and eventually disowned by its Russian ‘discoverers’. But both cold fusion and the memory of water live on in the imaginations of some, lodged now somewhere between a fringe curiosity and a conspiracy theory.

Yet for all the rancour of the arguments they elicited, these claims never became as confrontational, politicised and downright lunatic as those surrounding, say, the supposed causes of Covid-19 (5G wifi, bioweapons) or the ‘risks’ of the vaccines against it (allegedly laced with microdevices that will turn us into Bill Gates’ robots).