Water in Living Systems as the Primary Source of Structural Energy

 

Nancy Turner Banks

Extract from "The Slow Death of the AIDS/Cancer Paradigm" (2016)

 When biomolecules are separated from living matter or from catalysts, they are able to interact with many other molecules thereby producing a great number of reactions. But in the context of living matter, the biomolecule behaves very differently. Each biomolecule lives inside of each particular biochemical cycle in an almost-monogamous condition (at least within definite time intervals)—that is, a biomolecule (in the confined space of subcellular compartments) interacts with only well-defined partners and ignores the other biomolecules, with which interaction would have been possible in empty space. Living matter therefore produces a “context” that is capable of preventing a great number of chemical interactions that would theoretically be possible. It is this “context” that will be directly addressed in part 2 of this book. 

One of the most significant discoveries over the past three decades has been that water has quantum properties under ambient conditions and forms what have been termed exclusion zones or coherent domains next to protein surfaces. This revolutionary observation has greatly altered our understanding of redox chemistry, especially since all living systems gain energy from oxidation-reduction reactions—electron transfers from substances that can hold them more weakly to ones that can hold them more strongly. Ordinarily, water is considered a very poor electron donor. However, in a series of recent papers, Gerald Pollack has pointed out that water-hydrating hydrophilic surfaces is very different from bulk water in viscosity, density, freezing temperature, relative permittivity—so different that it has been termed the fourth phase of water. It appears that the thickness of this layer may reach hundreds of microns and that these water molecules may then oscillate in unison within extended coherent domains (CD) between two configurations: the first is where all electrons are tightly bound to their molecule; in the second configuration, one electron per molecule is almost free. In this way, a CD includes a reservoir of vortices of the plasma of quasi-free electrons. Since the vortex motion is coherent and frictionless (cannot decay thermally), its potential lifetime could be extremely long (weeks, months). Consequently, CDs become systems able to store large amounts of energy, transforming it from high-entropy to low-entropy energy. This stored energy can be released to nonaqueous molecules when the frequency of oscillation of these molecules matches the frequency of oscillation of the CD. Thus, these water networks are able to transmit information around the proteins and act as a control mechanism for protein dynamics. In this way, selected molecules get activated, facilitating the self-organizing biochemical processes that are the hallmark of living organisms.

This coherent domain/exclusion zone of water, or EZ water, has some unexpected properties: EZ water has negative electrical potential with respect to the bulk water adjacent to it (down to -150 mv), protons concentrate at the boundary between EZ water and bulk water, and EZ-water has a prominent peak of light adsorption at 270 nm, and it emits fluorescence when excited with this wavelength. The thickness of the EZ-water layer increases when illuminated with visible and especially IR radiation. Generally, a water molecule is considered a poor electron donor; however, all these listed features strongly suggest that electrons in EZ water are much less bound— they reside at a much higher state of excitation—than electrons in bulk water. Therefore, a much lower energy of excitation is needed to free them. As radiation, especially light in the IR part of the spectrum, increases the thickness of the layer of EZ water. It increases its electron-donating capacity. The H bonds in these structures last only a few picoseconds. The rapid fluctuations of this electrically charged structure are actually making it an antenna having an oscillation frequency in the infrared region. The wavelength of this oscillation is large enough to cover a huge number (in the millions) of molecules, producing a collective motion that cannot be reduced to the sum of two body scatterings.

 EZ water then becomes an almost-inexhaustible source of electrons and may therefore be considered as residing in a stable nonequilibrium state with respect to bulk water. To convert the potential energy of quasi-free electrons in EZ water into free energy capable of performing work, an acceptor of these electrons is needed. Oxygen is always available, and water is the ultimate source of oxygen on Earth. If EZ water is in contact with bulk water in which oxygen is dissolved, EZ water will donate electrons to oxygen. When EZ water (the excited state) reverts to bulk water (the ground state), high-grade, high-potential energy may be donated by this reaction for every fully reduced O2 molecule. This release of energy from excited to bulk phase is the “structural energy” (Bauer’s analogy) of EZ water that is released when two water molecules belonging to this stable nonequilibrium structure revert to ground state water molecules.

EZ water or coherent domains are thus able to give rise to significant electron transfer, which is very useful in biological systems where it supplies redox reactions. The probability of electron transfer is higher when the CDs are completely surrounded by the noncoherent state.

The importance of this is that water in the coherent domain is a process able to collect low-grade energy in the environment having high entropy and convert it, by exciting coherent vortices of almost-free electrons, into highgrade energy with low entropy. What happens to an organism over time when, because of chronic oxidative/nitrosative stressors leading to a significant electron deficit, the structural energy of electronic excitation combined with the decreased production of ATP is no longer sufficient to maintain the integrity and biorhythms of the dynamic cellular networks? What happens when the external cues are aberrant or absent? Is there a predictable way in which cells react under optimal and suboptimal conditions? Living cells may react to external stimuli in only a few evolutionary biological programmed specific ways: 

1. They may be induced to perform their specialized function. 

2. They may change/alter their specialized function by differentiation, dedifferentiation, or degeneration (see # 5 below for dedifferentiation and degeneration). 

3. They may enter into the mitotic cycle and proliferate. 

4. They may proceed to necrosis or to apoptosis (programmed cell death). This will be further defined under the theory of cellular dis-symbiosis as type 1 overregulation. 

5. They may counterregulate to establish a new lower energy homeostatic level. This will be further defined under the theory of cellular dissymbiosis as type 2 counterregulation, which leads to degeneration or dedifferentiation, depending on the cell type. 

Both type 1 overregulation (leading to apoptosis/necrosis) and type 2 counterregulation (leading to dedifferentiation and degeneration) have recurring predictable metabolic patterns based on principles of nonlinear quantum dynamics, redox chemistry, and evolutionary biology that answer many of the conundrums the AIDS theory has failed to address and to unify into a coherent theoretical model. Cellular dis-symbiosis has the aspect of a theory lacking in the theory of HIV/AIDS—predictive power. The essence of the HIV/AIDS theory is not that HIV causes AIDS, but that HIV causes AID, an acquired immune deficiency that has been defined as a decrease in CD4+T cells. It is the decrease in these immune cells that is said to be the cause the syndrome, “S”. This will be shown to be both a tenuous and unfounded proposition as a decrease in CD4+T cells is a common finding in many disease states or no disease state whatsoever. 

Under the theory of cellular dis-symbiosis, AEDS [acquired energy deficiency syndrome, Ed.] is redefined as thiol deficiency and has three identifiable stages: 

1. The clinically mute phase: reserve capacity of cell respiration at a critical threshold 

2. The clinically compensated phase: type 1 and type 2 cytokine dysregulation, type 1 to type 2 switch, type 1 overregulation of cell dissymbiosis, and/or type 2 counterregulation of cell dis-symbiosis, the point in time of a possible “HIV” test reaction. 

3. The clinically manifest phase: Opportunistic diseases, Kaposi’s sarcoma, lymphomas, myopathies, encephalopathies, wasting syndrome, etc. 

In the case of AIDS, the initial phase 3 patients presented with two identifiable diseases that only developed after long-term exposure to wellknown oxidative stressors that led to the electron deficit manifested by the consistent finding of glutathione deficiency: 

1. Prolonged nitrate inhalation 

2. Uncontrolled antibiotic consumption 

3. Analgesics 

4. Recreational drugs 

5. Chronic antigen stress as a result of multiple and or recurrent infections 

6. Alloantigenic stress via resorption of foreign proteins 90,91 

7. Psychological stress induced by lifestyle choices 

The hallmark diseases were: pneumocystis (PCP) and Kaposi’s sarcoma. Kaposi’s sarcoma is a pattern in which vascular endothelial cells are, after sustained electron deficits, beginning a “dis-symbiosis” of the cooperative trend of the chimeric genome and the mitochondria expressed as a dedifferentiation and a repetitive proliferative mitotic cycle—it is called cancer. PCP, a fungus, arose because of the glutathione deficit that led to the development of a counterregulation in immune cells to a type 2 cytokine predominance with an increased production of antibodies and away from the specialized function of the type 1 subset of the CD4+T immune cells and other immune cells that were no longer able to produce enough nitric oxide gas to kill attacking intracellular pathogens. That both the endothelial cells and the CD4+T immune cells acted in an evolutionary biological predictable manner to long-term harmful external stimuli that created persistent electron/proton deficits was not thirty years ago and is not now well understood by either researchers or clinicians and those who are still looking for viruses.