Conversations With a Tomas Hirschfeld Award Winner: Does Water Signal Onset of Disease?

Dr. Roumiana Tsenkova, Professor at  the Kobe University, Laboratory of Biological Measurements, in Japan was the 2006 recipient of the Tomas Hirschfeld Award for Excellence in Near Infrared Spectroscopy.  She was also kind enough to spend a few minutes with me discussing her work a few weeks ago at the Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water held in West Dover, Vermont.

Like all great scientific stories, hers began with an enigma, which was the identification of the essential factors in obtaining process reliability in yogurt production in her home country of Bulgaria.  Everyone knew that temperature was a key factor, but temperature controls did not solve the problem of guaranteeing yogurt coagulation.  The other factor- the enigma- was good milk.  What was good milk?  She found that good milk can only come from healthy cows, (naturally!), and she found that she could use Overtone Spectroscopy (also called Near Infrared Spectroscopy) to differentiate the enigmatically good milk from the bad milk.

This is a technique in which the milk (or subject of study) is excited with a light beam in the near infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum.  Because the frequency of this light beam resonates with many of the different types of chemical and physical bonds in water systems, the output of the excited sample provides clues to the relative distribution of various types of bonds in the sample.  Differences in milk quality reliably show up as subtle differences in this distribution (when you apply the appropriate mathematical transformations to the raw data).

It is important to emphasize that at this time the yogurt producers were unable to differentiate yogurt-yielding milk from non-yielding milk through simple chemical or biological assays.  There was some crucial factor about the milk that produced yogurt that the other milk did not have, but it defied definition or explanation.  In fact, although Overtone Spectroscopy reveals subtle physical differences in the milk that may be correlated to success in yogurt production, the explanation as to why or how such subtle differences lead to the end result remains at large.

Dr. Tsenkova extended this work to the diagnosis of cows themselves, and through the spectral differences in milk was able to observe when cows were in the very early stages of mastitis- earlier than chemical or biological diagnosis could prove effective.  In her Hirschfeld Lecture, she noted that, “the Water Absorbance Pattern, or Water Matrix, changes with the onset of disease.”  She has been able to utilize a similar technique to detect the presence of soybean mosaic virus in plant leaves, simply through the noninvasive evaluation of the Water Absorbance Pattern of the living tissue.

Over the years Dr. Tsenkova has extended this research to the study of water containing various pollutants: prions, metals, HIV virus, and other factors, and found that there is a specific Water Absorbance Pattern for each.  In other words, there are measurable differences in water’s internal structure that tell the story of what the water contains.

The end result of hours and hours of painstaking laboratory work and careful analysis by Dr. Tsenkova and her team is the suggestion of a new science: AquaPhotomics.  This is the study of light-water interactions, and is based upon the premise that it should be possible to expand work done to date to produce a library of water’s absorbance bands called the Aquaphotome and define Water Absorbance Patterns for each biological and water containing system under respective perturbation.

In other words, AquaPhotomics represents the effort to map the “water genome”.

Now, in case the rather civilized tone of this brief article has implied that the topics at hand are in some way interesting, but trivial- like a review of the advantage the opposable thumb may have provided to the richness of hand-signaling employed by a long-deceased band of Neanderthal mammoth hunters- I would like to disabuse you of that notion entirely.

Dr. Tsenkova’s research implies that water conveys information through patterns, like a vocabulary or genome, and that one day we may learn to read these in order to ascertain the health and quality of a wide variety of systems, including our own bodies.  She believes that in order to understand water and communicate about it in a precise way, “letters” and “words” are needed.  Water absorbance bands are the “letters” and Water Absorbance Patterns form the “words”.  This language then may provide a noninvasive means of diagnosis for a broad range of vectors and physical conditions, when read with the appropriate spectroscopy techniques.

She has even suggested, in the case of her studies of the HIV-1 virus, that the changes in water’s structure may not simply indicate the presence of the virus, but could even be relevant to its functioning.  The basis for this is the observation that changes in the Water Absorbance Pattern caused by the HIV-1 virus are consistent with those observed with superoxide production- which would be closely related to oxidative stress.  Oxidative stress in turn is presently associated with many forms of disease including Parkinson’s, heart disease, Alzheimer’s Syndrome, and chronic fatigue syndrome to name a few.

One of the most interesting ideas Dr. Tsenkova offered in our conversation is the notion that one day we will learn how to “read the water” in our bodies, and will be able to give ourselves exactly the type of water and nutrition that we need each day.  In her work studying mastitis in cows, she has already employed a simplified version of this approach to wellness, reading the Water Absorbance Patterns found in the milk in order to tailor the nutrition of the cow to its precise needs- well before chemical or biological indicators would have signaled the same needs.

Truly there is more to water than we generally imagine, and I hope many more dedicated researchers will carry this torch forward.  If you are interested in reading more about Dr. Tsenkova’s work, here are references to a few of her papers.

Tsenkova, Roumiana, et al.  Prion Protein Fate Governed by Metal Binding.  Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications. Volume 325, 2004, 1005-1012.

Tsenkova, Roumiana. AquaPhotomics: water absorbance pattern as a biological marker for disease diagnosis and disease understanding. NIR News. Volume 18, Number 2, March 2007.

Tsenkova, Roumiana.  Aquaphotomics: the extended water mirror effect explains why small concentrations of protein in solution can be measured with near infrared light. NIR News. Volume 19, Number 4, June 2008.

Tsenkova, Roumiana. Aquaphotomics: extended water mirror approach reveals peculiarities of prion protein alloforms. NIR News. Volume 18, Number 6, September 2007.

© 2009, Michael Mark