ACS | You might call Gerald H. Pollack “the Teflon professor.”
Pollack, a bioengineering professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, has been the subject of savage criticism for his heterodox theories about water—yet he continues to enjoy great success.
In the past decade, Pollack claims to have amassed experimental evidence that in addition to ice, liquid, and gas, water can form a fourth, gel-like or liquid-crystalline phase, as well as store charge—a property that would violate the law of electroneutrality in bulk fluids. Most water and electrochemists dismiss his results, saying they can be entirely explained by invoking basic water chemistry, and the presence of impurities.
These weighty judgments don’t seem to have deterred Pollack’s supporters, however. Pollack has published numerous papers on his theories in respected journals, including Physical Review E , and the ACS journals Langmuir and Journal of Physical Chemistry B . And this year, he received a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health’s new Transformative Research Projects Program (T-R01).
Pollack acknowledges that his research is controversial. “It’s impossible to break new ground without arousing controversy,” he tells C&EN. But, he adds, “I’ve somehow managed to stay funded.”
Despite—or perhaps because of—its ubiquity and central importance in biology, chemistry, and physics, water has long been steeped in controversy. In the 1960s, researchers debated the existence of polywater, a polymerized form of liquid water with high boiling point and viscosity. Polywater was eventually debunked, only to be replaced by the concept of water memory in the 1980s. This idea that liquid water can sustain ordered structures for long periods of time is one of the key tenets of homeopathy, a scientifically suspect concept, in which water supposedly “remembers” features of a solute even after repeated dilutions that remove all solute molecules. Water memory has also been debunked in the pages of Nature (1988, 334, 287).
In recent years, Pollack has moved outside the confines of the cell to the structure of water in general. In an annual faculty lecture at the University of Washington titled “Water, Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water’s Edge,” which is also making rounds on YouTube, Pollack describes what he calls an “exclusion zone” where microspheres in a container of water pull away from the surface, while an organized water gel thousands of layers thick forms. Any energy, whether from sunlight or heat, puts energy into the system, helping to increase the phenomenon, he says.
But as Pollack treads further into the territory of chemists, criticisms of his ideas have become more pointed. A recent paper of his in Langmuir, titled “Can Water Store Charge?” made the argument that pure water, hooked up to electrodes, will form large pH gradients that persist long after the current is turned off (Langmuir 2009, 25, 542). A firestorm ensued.
Until the early 2000s, most of Pollack’s publications centered on bioengineering topics such as the behavior of muscle proteins. But in 2001, he published the book “Cells, Gels, and the Engines of Life,” in which he dismantled the standard view of cells, including ion pumps and membrane channels. He posited instead that the water inside cells is a structured gel that plays a fundamental role in the organization and action of cellular structures.
Some reviewers took Pollack to task: University of Colorado, Boulder, biology professor Michael W. Klymkowsky criticized the book for an “overall style reminiscent of creationist writings” (Nat. Cell Bio. 2001, 3, E213). But some lauded the book’s fresh outlook. Harvard University bioengineering professor Donald Ingber described the book as a “nicely sculpted … polemic against complacency in the cell biology establishment” (Cell 2002, 109, 688).
0 comments:
Post a Comment