Eric Weinstein has stated that he considers the last great revolution in physics to be CN Yang’s “Yang-Mills theory” — a theory of nuclear binding. CN Yang came to the US to study after winning the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship in China. This scholarship chose one student from each field to represent the country and study in the US at a college of their choice. Yang, the only physics representative of the scholarship, chose the University of Chicago. There, he was roommates with the sole biology representative: Gilbert Ling. Yang and Ling, unbeknownst to most, collaborated during his time in Chicago. Yang then went on to win a Nobel prize in just a decade, solidifying his historical spot as a revolutionary physicist.
Ling, however, was swept into the winds of time. Ling, with the push of Yang, created a statistical mechanical theory of life. This theory of life led to the creation of the MRI, but has been ignored or socially censored, and is thus abandoned.
The conventional theory of the cell is roughly:
1. There is a lipid membrane keeping ‘stuff’ inside the cell.
2. There are pumps and channels in the membrane which ceaselessly transport charged atoms (ions) in and out of the cell, generating an electrical potential.
3. The inside of the cell is a dilute sack of unstructured water—ions are free to move around, and not associated with proteins (otherwise, the channels and pumps wouldn’t work!).
This is easy for biologists to understand and accept. They will remember “pump,” and “charges,” and the vague notion that movement of charges is related to electricity, and believe that it makes sense.
Ling saw major issues with this view, though. Namely, the amount of energy in the cell was not enough to operate the pumps by multiple orders of magnitude. Later investigations showed that you could completely remove the membrane and the cell wouldn’t leak all of its ions, removing the possibility that ion channels were the architects of cell permeability. Ling also created membraneless solutions of protein that could exclude sodium, while the conventional theory posited that you need a pump to remove sodium constantly. Mountains of evidence continued to go unaddressed which contradicted the conventional membrane theory.
However, Ling’s theory was not easy to understand for a biologist. Biologists often go into biology because of their preference towards memorization over rigorous logic. Without compressing his theory to a level where meaning is lost, Ling’s theory states that life is a metastable state of water and ion adsorption on protein chains, and the action of life is to undergo ferromagnetic cooperative phase transitions between adsorption states, triggered by association-induction of cardinal adsorbents.
Not as easy to visualize as “pumps.”
A more simple way to frame it, which Ling unfortunately never said, is that life is kind of like an excitable, charged Jello. In his theory, the negatively charged proteins inside of the cell can generate cellular electrical potentials. The charges on proteins can associate with oppositely charged ions, creating the illusion of pumping. Finally, the negative charges on proteins can change their preference for ions based on the binding of a ‘controller’ molecule, a “cardinal adsorbent.”
The theory is notoriously hard to simplify. While it has much more experimental success than the membrane pump theory, such as in the case of the specially-formulated red blood cell ‘ghost’ that has no membrane yet still ‘pumps’ ions, the theory is no longer worked on. Quite literally, everyone who was working on it is now dead. Students are only taught the membrane pump theory.
Figures in the alternative health space have picked up on Gilbert Ling and his ideas. Ray Peat has written much about Ling. Jack Kruse has name-dropped Ling quite a few times. Many people who follow Gerald Pollack know of Ling, because Pollack claimed that Ling’s work formed the basis of his theories (yet he departed massively).
Unfortunately, virtually all figures who have mentioned Ling in modern spaces have severely misconstrued his work (except maybe Ray Peat himself—his disciples still get it wrong).
Ling’s name is used to promote “structured water” products, such as water vortexers. Water structures are extremely transient, lasting femtoseconds in bulk phase. Gilbert Ling’s theory is that protein surfaces must be in constant contact with water for the water to have any sort of average structure change. The second the protein changes folding state, the water must lose its structure, otherwise life could not function!
Every structured water product could not work if this is true. They claim that water structure can last for a long time, and that drinking structured water or spraying it on your plants will confer great benefits.
The greatest “champion” of Ling’s work in our times seems to be Gerald Pollack, who claimed that Ling directed his life’s work. While I’m sure he has integrity and is an earnest scientist seeking truth, his body of work does no favors for the promotion of Ling’s theories for two main reasons.
For one, despite claiming to base his ideas on Ling’s work, Pollack posits a completely new structure of water with insufficient evidence or theoretical foundation, called “hexagonal water.” The general idea is that, under the influence of a hydrophilic surface, water forms hexagonal sheets, similar to sheets of graphene. This is not similar to Ling’s water, as Ling’s water required a surface with ∼3.1 Å separated regularly interspaced positive and negative charges that could polarize and orient water dipoles into a dynamic, cubic-like lattice, on average. That is — in a real, imperfect system, a few layers of water will have slightly more interaction energy that biases them towards a polarized state.
Clearly, Ling’s water structure had a level of nuance that extended far beyond the ‘hydrophilic -> hexagon’ logic that Pollack employed, to the degree that these are incompatible theories. The Wikipedia page for “hexagonal water” labels it as pseudoscience, and previously, Ling’s Wikipedia page also stated that his structured water was pseudoscience with a link to the hexagonal water page. The Wikipedia editor clearly equated the two theories. (I have since removed the claim.)
A second reason why Pollack’s work harms Ling’s ideas is that he does nothing to dispel the scams built on his work. Vortexed water and other structured water products claim they create Pollack’s “fourth phase of water,” or “hexagonal water.” While he should be proving the existence of his special structure of water, he publishes papers such as “Impact of Wi-Fi Energy on EZ Water” (Pollack, 2021). Clearly, this polarizes skeptics further.
Ling’s theory is immediately seen to be anti-memetic due to its complexity. There is a visceral reluctance to try and understand statistical mechanics as a biologist.
Gilbert Ling’s work persists as an anti-meme in the scientific world precisely because the theory is memetic in the health space. The world of grifters has latched onto it, so it’s dangerous to talk about from within the scientific machine. Those in the health space talk about the theory with little understanding of what Ling actually said, so the majority of skeptical people introduced to Ling only know the worst possible constructions of his ideas.
The theory was also anti-memetic during its development for political reasons. It was somewhat censored while being developed: the NIH defunded Ling, even after his theory led to the creation of the MRI by Raymond Damadian, because membrane theory supporters made their way up the ranks of the organization. Fortunately, Damadian, being a good Christian, decided to fund Ling’s research for the rest of his life, owing his fortune to Ling.
Revisionist history also served to censor Ling’s theory. Raymond Damadian invented the MRI. He published the first study showing that cancer cells had different T1/T2 times under NMR. He did the first scan on animals. He did the first scan on humans. He sold the first MRI to a hospital. But, he did not get the Nobel prize for it. Paul Lauterbur did instead, simply for improving methods related to MRI.
After making the MRI, Raymond Damadian was a vocal creationist and denied Darwinian evolution. He believed God created the world in a week, exactly as detailed in Genesis. When Paul Lauterbur received the Nobel, he was asked what he’d work on next. After spending a long career as an inorganic chemist, mostly studying non-living materials like boron, Lauterbur told the press that he would work on molecular evolution. Lauterbur was also the previous boss of Damadian from years before the invention. The Nobel was clearly given to serve as an anti-Christian pro-evolution political statement against Damadian.
The biggest fruit from Ling’s theory so far is definitively MRI, but Damadian was the one who credited Ling, not Lauterbur. Since it is very easy for skeptics to discredit Damadian, they can even more easily discredit Ling.
The strongest scientific anti-memes are those that threaten the identity and careers of scientific authority, while being memetic in spaces of grifters who lack any sort of nuance. This is where arbitrage lies.
- anabology