Page 75 - Summer 2017 Journal

Wise Traditions Podcast Interviews
INTERVIEW WITH DR. GERALD POLLACK
Hilda Labrada Gore: Dr. Gerald Pollack is a brilliant man, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington who got his bach- elor of science from New York University and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a well-known lecturer and author who has made some amazing discoveries about wa- ter. Gerry will tell us about the fourth phase of water and how “negative charge creates positive energy.” But first, how did you get into water?
Gerald Pollack, PhD: I immersed myself, so to speak, into water. It happened about twenty years ago. I’d been studying the contraction of muscles. If you read about muscles in textbooks or popular books, you see the proteins that bend and twist and turn and interact, and the contrac- tion at the molecular level. It occurred to me that something was missing from this picture. What’s missing? Water. Muscle cells, like all cells of our body, are mostly water. Two-thirds of our muscle is water, by volume. The water molecule is really small, so two-thirds by volume means that you need a lot of water molecules to fill that volume. If you do the arithmetic and do a molecular count, with all the molecules lined up, more than ninety-nine out of every one hundred molecules in muscle is a water molecule. It struck me as weird that we’re try- ing to understand how muscles contract, but we omit more than 99 percent of the molecules that are involved.
HG: I see. We are paying attention to the muscle fiber, not the water?
GP: We are paying attention to the muscle proteins that are in the fiber and not the water, but the water is the most populous member of the family that’s there. It’s certainly possible, as textbooks assert, that the water is nothing
SUMMER 2017
more than the background carrier of the more significant molecules of life. However, there is a lot of evidence that that assumption simply isn’t true. We started to think about water and the involvement of water in muscle contrac- tions at the molecular scale, and we found the gold mine. It turns out that water is absolutely essential for everything that muscles do. It also became clear that if water plays a significant role in what happens in the muscles, it probably also plays a significant role in what happens in the nerves, kidneys, liver and in the whole being. That’s how we got started.
HG: This is the theme of your latest book?
GP: The book is called The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid and Vapor. We discovered that the role of water—not only in muscles, but in everything—evolves from a different type of water. What I mean is that although we know that we are two-thirds water, that water is not the same as water in a drinking glass. It’s a different kind of water. It’s a water that builds or gets structured next to solids at interphases. It’s not just a little bit of it, it’s not just a layer of water that intersects or that meets the solids. It extends out by, up to thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of molecular layers. There’s a lot of it. We got interested in understanding this kind of water.
HG: You have mentioned “we.” Who else is involved?
GP: I’m at the University of Washington, and I have a very active laboratory consisting of visit- ing scientists, postdoctoral fellows, postgradu- ate and graduate students—as well as numerous undergraduate students, who are actually the most creative and brightest of all. We work to-
Hilda Labrada Gore, a mother of four, has been involved with WAPF for over ten years and is the chapter leader for Washington, DC. She went to Kenya last summer on behalf of WAPF.
She is the director
of communications for Body & Soul, a worldwide fitness organization. She also plays the
guitar and is the contemporary music leader at National Presbyterian Church.
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