The affair of the memory of water. Towards a sociology of scientific communication

Summary: When, in 1988, Nature finally published results by Jacques Benveniste seeming to show that water could 'remember' the properties of substances in ultra-high dilutions, it detonated an 'epistemiological bombshell' that highlighted the way scientists now use the mass media to publicize their work. They have become entrepreneurs who, in order to interest others in a discovery that may be unacceptable to the established scientific journals, must mobilize and orchestrate a number of different communication resources to build their own information networks. This analysis of the affair may prompt a more thorough exploration of the many paths that lead to the construction of scientific facts.