Ep.30: The Fourth Phase of Water with Gerald Pollack

Robyn Openshaw:              Hey everyone. Robyn Openshaw here and welcome back to Your High Vibration Life. Today I am interviewing Dr. Gerald Pollack, and we mentioned him at the end of Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt interview with me, which I absolutely loved and I asked him just a few actionable things that you could do to raise your vibration.

One of the things he talked about was getting in an infrared sauna everyday, which I’m a big fan of and I have an infrared sauna in my own home. Another thing he said is to read Dr. Gerald Pollack’s book, “The Fourth Phase of Water.” So today I interview Dr. Pollack who received a PhD in bio-medical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.

He joined the University of Washington faculty and he’s now a professor of bio engineering. He’s also the founding editor in chief of the journal, “Water.” He has a fascinating background as a scientist studying muscles and bringing back the study of water.

Hi Dr. Gerald Pollack or Gerry. Thank you so much for joining us today on Your High Vibration Life.

Gerald Pollack:                    Oh, it’s my pleasure. Good to be here with you Robyn.

Robyn Openshaw:              I’ve really been enjoying your book. We came together, you and I, because we did some amazing interviews with Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt who you know and he, at the end of his interview, said that four things that you should do … I said, “Give me four actionable things that someone could do to raise their vibration,” an he literally, out of all things in the world said that one of those four was, “Get Gerry Pollack’s book, ‘The Fourth Phase of Water.'”

So I immediately ordered it and read it and I was so amazed at how you are so disruptive in your thinking of what water is and you point out how little we actually know about water. How is it possible that we don’t know much about water?

Gerald Pollack:                    That’s a really good question, Robyn. I have thought about it. I think the reason is that we used to know a lot more about water. In fact, water was a really common subject of interest to scientists, especially around the 1940s and 50s and such.

Then there was the advent of sophisticated equipment and the sophisticated equipment allowed scientists to look at individual molecules, to parts of molecules, and even parts of parts of molecules. Of course, scientists being human and as they are, scientists found it interesting to explore at levels much deeper than the entire cell. So science has pulls apart, especially, I’m talking mostly about the biological realm. But it actually is similar in physics and chemistry.

The ability to study at deeper levels to find out more about the interstices of these molecules and they forgot about water. Water seems unimportant. Water is considered by biologists and biochemists as nothing more than the background carrier of the more important molecules of life, the proteins, the nucleic acids, just like a bathtub in which these molecules bathe, and who’s interested in the bathtub?

To supplement that, there were a few debacles that took place. The end result of these, I don’t know if you’d call them scandals or what, they dissuaded scientists from investigating water. The first one was called “The Poly Water Incident.” It took place around the early 1960s if I have it right. Some Russians had discovered a kind of water that had really unusual properties and it was just at the time that the West was becoming aware of Russian work because the Russian work was not translated.

So it became translated and people began studying it. A few groups got really interested, and because it looked like a kind of water that nobody else had seen before and so when it got to the West, American and western scientists were faced with a dilemma. Either the Russians had scored in a big way and found something really interesting or it’s time to show dramatically what fools they are.

Many of the serious scientists began taking up the study of this unusual kind of water. In time, some of them found that it was actually an experimental artifact. It was not real, and that really took hold. One group said that when these Russians put the water in these thin capillary tubes and looked at all the interesting properties, the Russians didn’t even know it, but the water was actually leaching some of the silica from these glass tubes, so it wasn’t pure water as the Russians had suggested, but it was actually a kind of gel made of water and silica.

So they became the laughing stock of scientific world and it became a big scientific joke and those scientists wouldn’t go within a mile of studying anything that had to do with water. Very few scientists have been involved with water. That is changing. We actually organize a meeting. It’s in Elin, Bulgaria every October. It’s called the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water. It’s a wonderful meeting.

Robyn Openshaw:              It’s exciting that after water languishing as something to study for so long as been so revived. I know that you have played a big role in that. We’re going to talk about, I really do want to talk about what these findings about water have to do with our health and our happiness. What does this mean? If this is happening in our cells, if water has memory, if water has social behavior, what does this mean for us that is sort of earth-shaking? I just want to back up for a quick second and look at the macro level of this.

What you’ve basically said is that for a while they thought they knew everything about water, and they thought they had it all broken down. It was all reductionistic. Let’s back up. Before we talk a little bit more about the social behavior of water and about water memory and what homeopathy is because I learned a lot more about that from your book Gerry.

Let’s back up and just tell me really fast about your background and how you came to study water.

Gerald Pollack:                    I began by studying muscles, not the kinesiology type but at the molecular-level, how do actin and myosin, the major proteins that are inside of the muscle, how do they come together to produce motion? Well, there have been, and still is a prevailing scientific view about how these proteins come together to produce motions.

Something didn’t make sense from that. First thing that didn’t make sense is that the theory simply didn’t fit the evidence. We made many measurements around the mechanical properties of muscles and tried to relate those properties to the theory and they just didn’t fit.

I also came to realize at the same time, and this is getting to your point, that scientists were taking into account the proteins inside the muscles, but they were neglecting the most abundant ingredient and that was water. Muscle is two thirds water. Very truly, every scientist studying muscle ignored the most abundant ingredient inside the muscle.

The main point is that the water inside the cell is not like water in a glass. The molecules are ordered, so this is a kind of structured water. Perhaps it’s not a very good name because everything has structure and the understanding of this kind of water inside the cell was critical for understanding of life and certainly for how muscles contract.

The fact that the water molecules are ordered inside the cell is really important. The water was not only critical for muscle and how muscles work but also for every major organelle inside the body. A simple transition from the structured water to the ordinary unstructured water was an absolute key to driving so many molecular processes.

Robyn Openshaw:              So structured water and unstructured water leads to understanding some key molecular processes. Tell me about that.

Gerald Pollack:                    Okay. I’ll talk about muscles. We found out that in the relaxed state in muscles, the water is this kind of structured water. It’s like a liquid crystal, all the molecules are ordered and lined up, and in the relaxed state, muscles are compliant. You can stretch them and such. Nothing really is happening. To initiate the contraction, what happens is that the water undergoes a transition from the structured water to the unstructured water. This is a key.

There are other suggested keys like the arrival of calcium near the proteins, but I think this is more fundamental, and there’s evidence to suggest that. What happens is that the molecules are ordinarily surrounded by this kind of structured water. I’ll tell you more about the water because we learned quite a bit about the so-called structured water.

What happens is that these molecules, you might say they melt into ordinary unstructured, the kind of water that you would be drinking. The proteins then sense a difference of environment. With that difference of environment, the proteins fold. They undergo a transition from their ordinary extended state to a contracted state and that is what turns on the contraction of your muscle.

Now, for you muscles to relax, this water needs then to return to the initial structured state. This is an energy-requiring process. That’s why, if you’ve overused your muscles and there’s a cramp, your muscles have a tendency to remain not in the relaxed state but in the contracted state. The reason for that is that in order to return them to the uncontracted or relaxed state, you need to put in energy. That energy is required to turn the water back from the unstructured state to the structured state. This is one example.

The evidence that I am able to adduce is that all of these processes require a transition from the ordered to the disordered state. Water is so absolutely central. One of my heroes in science is Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, a famous Hungarian scientist, his pithy statements. He made many of them. One of them was, “Life is water dancing to the tune of solids.” So he knew that the water movements were absolutely critical for everything.

Robyn Openshaw:              Yeah, that’s been a lot of what I’ve learned from you about water is how much we don’t know about it and I don’t know that any other scientist of my lifetime is talking about water in the mainstream. Tell us what do we not know about water that we should.

Gerald Pollack:                    What have we found that people didn’t know before. We found when we learned about water in middle school perhaps, or even younger, we learn that water has three phases. It has a solid phase. That’s ice. It has a liquid phase. That’s what we drink. And it has a vapor phase, the stuff that’s floating in the air and makes clouds and such.

Oddly, even a hundred years ago, some scientists thought that there must be a fourth phase because if you take into account these three phases, it’s really hard to explain so many chemical and physical features of water. Something is definitely missing from the equation.

We found, thanks to a Japanese colleague who alerted us, we found it an experimental preparation that we could use to look at it, and this turned out to be a really amazing find. The first experiments reveal that this kind of water was indeed ordered, liquid crystalline, and as it formed, just like ice forms, it pushes out everything, all of the debris and such in order to create perfect crystals that are very well organized.

The way we found this is we put into an experimental chamber filled with water in little particles. We call them micro spheres, little spheres, one micrometer in diameter. We put a piece of material whose surface is hydrophilic, so hydrophilic you know is water-loving. It means that if you were to take this surface and lay it horizontally and drop the droplet of water on it, the water would spread out instead of like Teflon, which is hydrophobic, the water beads up.

The water spreads out, we found … that something interesting happens. When the water meets such a hydrophilic surface, the water molecules that are near that surface undergo a massive change, and by the way, this change occurs not only in the layer of molecules that actually touch the surface but up to millions of molecular layers. We couldn’t believe what we saw.

Many experiments confirm that this was so. It’s practically macroscopic, what we saw. What we saw is that as this region grew, it pushed out all of those little micro spheres that we were looking at. After doing many experiments with many kinds of particles and molecules and many surfaces, some Australian colleague said, “Hey, you know you got to give this a name, this area that has no micro spheres,” and so he suggested “exclusion zone,” which abbreviated is EZ, which is cool because it’s easy to remember.

Anyway, it’s a zone, this so-called structured water is a zone that excludes solutes, many kinds of solutes. Later we called this the “fourth phase of water” because we found that so many of its properties, essentially every property we examined, and now there are roughly ten different categories of physical, chemical properties. They’re all different radically.

Ordinary water has no charge to it. It’s neutral. However, this is not neutral. Typically, it’s negative charged, so it means that the region next to these hydrophilic surfaces, the region of water, the EZ region, exclusion zone region, fourth phase region, has negative charge. The reason beyond it, just ordinary water then has positive charge [inaudible 00:15:21] and maybe even more importantly in terms of health is is the energy that charges this battery and builds the ordered structure.

To go from this ordered structure to an ordered structure, you need energy to do that. A good example of it is your room, which we all tend to mess up our offices and rooms and it doesn’t take a lot of energy to do that. We just leave our papers around and drinking flasks and debris. But if you want to get it ordered again, put things away, takes energy to do that.

So it’s the same with any system. To order it, to go from disordered water to ordered water, you need energy. We scratched our head for along time before we came to realize where the source of energy was and it was staring us right in the face and we just never thought of it. It’s light. How did we find out?

A student in the lab was doing his experiment on the lab bench and sitting next to him was one of these gooseneck lamps, and he did what he wasn’t supposed to do. It’s great. I love when the students do that. He took the lamp and shined the lamp on the chamber to see what went on, and what he found was astounding. The region of the chamber, or the region of the exclusion zone already existing in the chamber, the region that received the light grew and it grew like crazy. It was not 10% or something. It grew to be 300%.

Then we went on obviously to do more experiments because it appeared that energy from light or photo energy was the energy, or at least one of the energies that’s used to build the exclusion zone. We tried many studies with many different wavelengths of light ranging from the short wavelengths, the ultraviolet through the visible spectrum, through much of the infrared longer wavelengths and we found that pretty much all of them had some effect but when you got to the infrared wavelengths, particularly around 3 micrometer wavelengths, the effect was amazing.

It was just a very weak LED light-emitting diode that generated infrared could build the exclusion zone spectacularly.

Robyn Openshaw:              Wow. I was going to ask you that because Dr. Klinghardt who referred us to you of course was talking to us about how getting in an infrared sauna can be super powerful for raising your vibration. I told you that he said that reading your book is important because this EZ water, which has been a lot of your life’s work in these recent years is where our bodies have the ability to receive charge to increase or decrease vibration. Tell us why we feel so good after a sauna because that kind of brings together two of the things that Dr. Klinghardt talked about, your friend Dr. Klinghardt.

So tell us why we feel so good after a sauna relative to EZ water and to infrared waves, that we can get from the sun, but we can actually put a sauna in our house and use it.

Gerald Pollack:                    Yeah, the reason we feel good is because of just what I mentioned, but there’s a bit of background. Because infrared energy builds EZ water, and so the question then, if you’re in an infrared sauna, then you get a lot of infrared, and if you have a lot of infrared, then the rate of growth of the EZ water is high, and so you can get it from the sun, but if you concentrate it, then you can get a lot more of it more quickly.

I know he’s also experimenting with infrared devices that can localize, can supply infrared to different regions of your body apparently with success. Let’s back up a step. We all think our cells are filled with water. We know that we’re 70% water, but in fact the type of water that fills our cells is not H2O. It’s not the stuff we drink. It’s actually the fourth phase water.

Almost all of the water inside our cells is fourth phase water and is EZ water, by the way is negatively charged, and I’ve argued that contrary to what most people believe is that the reasons our cells are negatively charged is not because of pumps and channels in the membrane but because the water inside of our cells, the water is negatively charged. It’s very simple. You have a bag and you put a bag of negative stuff into it and you’re going to have overall negativity.

For healthy people there’s plenty of EZ water surrounding every protein inside the body, but those of us who are long in the tooth or those of us who have some kind of pathologies, pathologies are often associated with dehydration and not enough water. In some way, the amount of EZ water inside the cells of pathological organs is deficient and when the EZ water is deficient, the proteins can’t do their job. They can’t fold in the way they’re supposed to fold because they see an environment that’s grossly different from their normal physiological environment.

So they struggle. They can kind of begin bending and such and wiggle, but they can’t do what they do naturally which means for example that your muscles are not contracting properly or your nerves are not conducting properly or your blood is not flowing properly or your cells are not dividing properly, etc. etc. You want to restore the cell or organelle back to its normal condition. Well how do you do that?

I can tell you about a half dozen different ways that we’ve been studying and one of them is infrared sauna because it concentrates the infrared light. You get a lot of it. Your cells build EZ water and whatever issue that you have associated with not enough of that EZ water should tend to reverse.

Again, I think the underlying reason has mainly to do with a buildup of EZ water inside our cells and we need that EZ water to function properly.

Robyn Openshaw:              Love it, and so tell me why we feel so good after we walk on the beach.

Gerald Pollack:                    It has to do with a negative charge. Let me explain. This water is negatively charged. Our bodies are negatively charged. We and others have made those measurements, and it’s natural that we think we’re neutral, but in fact we’re built mostly of cells and the cells are negatively charged so when you add up the sum of the parts, you get to negative charge and even the extracellular tissues are negatively charged.

So we’re negatively charged and we try hard to get rid of positive charge. For example, every time we breath out, we breath CO2 and water vapor. Put the two together, that’s carbonic acid. Carbonic acid. Protons, we get rid of protons. We breath out protons, get rid of that positive charge. Now, if we’re not feeling completely up to par, or even if we are, we walk on the beach.

So what happens if we walk barefoot on the beach? Well we connect to the earth and the usual understanding of this is well there are some perhaps psychological affect of bonding with Mother Earth and there may be something to that, however there’s something more, and that is something that I discovered only ten years ago, and completely surprised and astounded to find a truth.

I subsequently could confirm that the earth is not neutral. It’s negatively charged. So what are you doing when you walk on the beach? Well you’re connecting a body with a practically infinite source of negative charge. You sop up that negative charge and you need that negative charge for building EZ water. EZ water is negatively charged.

You take water and electrons that are coming from the earth that helps to rebuild and restore your EZ water.

Robyn Openshaw:              Wonderful, so tell me about water having memory. I know that this relates a lot to the study of homeopathy, which is still to this day really controversial. Do you believe that water has memory and what does that have to do with the whole field of medicine that is homeopathy?

Gerald Pollack:                    If you think about the process of homeopathy, what you think is you start with some substance, usually a natural substance and you take one part, nine parts water or ninety-nine parts water, and mix them together and shake it. Then you take one part and again mix it with nine parts or ninety-nine parts of water. Shake it, and you keep doing that and of course, by conventional analysis, what happens is that original substance keeps getting diluted by ten times or a hundred times, etc.

When you keep doing that, eventually, when you do this process say 20 or 25 times, then statistically you have nothing left except water and if that water has the same effect of the original, then the implication is that the water must have some memory of molecules in which it was contact. That appears wrong, and the reason I say this so dogmatically is not because there aren’t experiments but a famous and distinguished Russian scientist, his name was Konovalov, started studying what happens when you do high dilutions.

The results are shocking. What happens is not what you expect. What happens is when you do the first dilution and the second, it’s pretty much as you expect, third, fourth. When you get to the fifth or sixth dilution, what happens is instead of the substance becoming more diluted, what you get is these little aggregates. He calls them nano aggregates and they consist of water and presumably some of the initial substance, and the next dilution these nano aggregates grow and the next dilution they grow more.

Then they reach a peak and the next dilution they’re on the wane, and the next dilution fewer and so on. Then nothing happens with the next four or five or six dilutions and then the process begins again and they build up and up and up and then down and down and down and this keeps repeating indefinitely.

Something is different from what we think and good possibility that some of the original has remained and these nano aggregates obviously consist mostly of water, otherwise, what else is there in there? Presumably this water is EZ water. You have nano aggregates consisting of some of the original stuff plus EZ water.

He found also that if you follow the standard homeopathic procedure which is to shake violently after each one, then you get the result that I just related to you. If you don’t shake, you don’t get the result, so the shaking appears to be critical. Also, if you block off the energy from the environment, you don’t get the same result.

Two things are critical. One is the shaking. That’s an integral part of the homeopathic procedure and you must have energy from the environment. These features are similar to the features that are necessary for building EZ water. Possible that the EZ water is also storing information from those molecules because we know from many experiments, that water, especially EZ water has a structure, a very well-organized structure that has the capability of storing information.

We’re studying this now in the laboratory, but beyond that it’s known that water itself, some kind of water, clearly has the capacity to store information, demonstrating some kind of memory, but anyway the process of homeopathy is different from those who are ready to dismiss it because they think, “Oh, it’s impossible.” The physical chemistry says, “No.” What you expect is not what you get.

Robyn Openshaw:              Yeah, and people don’t understand what homeopathy is. It takes a while to kind of explain it but it really is about water’s memory, and so that has everything to do with your work. So thank you for your work. Thank you for your Ted Talk. We’ll put it in the show notes. If you’d like to watch Dr. Gerry Pollack’s Ted Talk on EZ water and what this has to do with science in the modern age, in the age of Einsteinian physics and biology, not just Newtonian where we understand molecules and atoms and protons and electrons.

We will link you to that and we will also link you to his book, “The Fourth Phase of Water,” so thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Gerry Pollack.

Gerald Pollack:                    Well thank you Robyn for the invitation. Been a pleasure.