Jacques Benveniste

Jacques Benveniste (French: [ʒɑk bɛ̃venist]; 12 March 1935 – 3 October 2004) was a French immunologist born in Paris. In 1979, he published a paper on the structure of platelet-activating factor and its relationship with histamine. He was head of allergy and inflammation immunology at the French biomedical research agency INSERM.

Jacques Benveniste was promoted to "Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite", 1984, and honoured with the "Médaille d’Argent du CNRS", 1985. He published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles in Immunology, of which 26 in the J. Immunol. from 1971 to 1994.

In 1988, after more than 6 years applying his classical research method to high dilutions and thousands of experiments, Benveniste and colleagues published a paper in Nature describing the action of very high dilutions of anti-IgE antibody on the degranulation of human basophils, findings that seemed to support the concept of homeopathy. After the article was published, a follow-up investigation was set up by a team including John Maddox, James Randi and Walter Stewart. With the cooperation of Benveniste's own team, the group failed to replicate the original results, and subsequent investigations did not support Benveniste's findings. Benveniste refused to retract, damaging his reputation and forcing him to fund research himself, as external sources of funding were withdrawn. In 1997, he founded the company DigiBio to "develop and commercialise applications of Digital Biology." Benveniste died in 2004 in Paris following heart surgery.