An Italian researcher who has recently completed a visiting professorship at DTU claims that water contains hidden properties which may have a major impact on areas such as cancer treatment.
Some researchers have a theory that water is not simply water. They believe that, in addition to it being a precondition for all life, water may also form coherent structures that allow it to store energy, which can be released as a signal if the water is stimulated with a weak electromagnetic impulse at a given frequency. As 99 per cent of the human body consists of water molecules, advocates of the theory believe their discovery could lead to a paradigm shift in the fields of both biology and medicine.
Professor Livio Giuliani from the Research Center Monteporzio Catone in Rome is one of the still relatively few researchers working on the new and as yet unconfirmed theory. Thanks to an Otto Mønsted visiting professorship with Professor Anja Boisen at DTU Nanotech www.nanotech.dtu.dk/english, he has recently spent two months at DTU, working with researchers from DTU Space and DTU Nanotech on a range of experiments designed to test the capacity of water to receive and transmit electromagnetic signals.
“The exciting thing about these new discoveries is that they suggest that water functions as a kind of antenna, transmitting or amplifying electromagnetic signals in living cells. And if we can start to understand these signals, then they can be put to all kinds of uses,” explains Professor Livio Giuliano.
"The exciting thing about these new discoveries is that they suggest that water functions as a kind of antenna, transmitting or amplifying electromagnetic signals in living cells."
Professor Livio Giuliani
Stem cells and cancer
Working with a team of Italian researchers, Professor Livio Giuliano has proved that it is possible to stimulate stem cells to differentiate into heart cells simply by stimulating them with a weak electromagnetic impulse at a specific frequency. The purpose of the experiment was to save patients who have suffered a heart attack.
Professor Livio Giuliani also believes that it should be possible to stimulate cancer cells—which are actually cells that never mature—using specific frequencies, with the result that they no longer constitute a threat. Researchers in the United States have already experimented with treating patients suffering from cancer tumours in the brain with specific electromagnetic frequencies rather than surgery, and the results have been so promising that the American health authorities recently approved a machine based on this technology for the treatment of brain cancer.
More basic research
It was Senior Researcher Nikolaj Blom, an associate professor and bioinformatician at DTU Systems Biology, who took the initiative to bring Professor Livio Giuliano to DTU.
“I was very curious when I first heard about the experiments with stem cells. So I travelled to Rome, and having followed Livio’s research for quite a while, I’m convinced that there is huge potential in this new field of research, which hasn’t even been named yet,” he says.
Nikolaj Blom thinks that ‘quantum biology’ might be a suitable name for the field, because it actually has to do with how the laws of quantum physics regarding electromagnetic fields affect living organisms.
“We have made a lot of progress on describing living organisms from molecular and biochemical perspectives, but there is still a great deal we don’t really understand: such as how DNA code is actually translated into a three-dimensional organism, or how molecules can so accurately recognize one another,” he adds.
“I believe that quantum biology has the potential to add crucial new knowledge to our understanding of life as a whole. And that is why we should set up a basic research centre for the field of quantum biology. At least, that’s our dream ...”