Gerald Pollack

Gerald Pollack
Gerald Pollack
Residence	Seattle, Washington, USA
Nationality	USA
Known for	Fourth phase of water, Exclusion zone (EZ) water, WATER journal, Institute for Venture Science
	Scientific career
Fields	Bioengineering, Biophysics, Water science
Institutions	University of Washington

Gerald H. Pollack is an American bioengineer and Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is best known for his claim that water possesses a fourth phase — an ordered, gel-like "exclusion zone" (EZ) state lying between solid and liquid — and for the wide-ranging consequences he draws from it for cell biology, energy and health. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal WATER: A Multidisciplinary Research Journal, founder of the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, and Executive Director of the Institute for Venture Science, which he established to fund high-risk research that challenges mainstream scientific consensus.

Biography

(biographical details from his University of Washington biosketch)

Pollack took a B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1961, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. He joined the University of Washington in 1968 and has spent his entire academic career there.

Professional experience

1968-73 Assistant Professor, Department of Anesthesiology and Division of Bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle
1973-77 Associate Professor, Anesthesiology & Bioengineering
1977-81 Professor, Anesthesiology & Bioengineering
1981- Professor of Bioengineering

His early research was on muscle contraction and cardiac mechanics; from the 1990s onward his laboratory turned increasingly to the behaviour of water at surfaces and inside cells, which has been its central concern ever since.

Beyond his own laboratory, Pollack has worked to change how science itself is funded. Arguing in the early 2000s that the peer-reviewed grant system had become structurally hostile to unorthodox ideas, he campaigned for programs supporting genuinely transformative research; the NSF's "Frontiers in Biological Research" program and the NIH Director's Pioneer Award are cited as outcomes of that advocacy. In 2013 he founded the Institute for Venture Science, whose model is to fund several independent teams pursuing the same heterodox hypothesis simultaneously, so that a challenge to consensus cannot be dismissed as a single anomalous laboratory. He is also a co-founder of 4th-Phase Inc.

Honors and awards

Tau Beta Pi Kulka Award, 1961; Eta Kappa Nu Kulka Award, 1961
Polytechnic Institute Merit Key; Engineering Honor Societies (Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi)
Established Investigatorship, American Heart Association, 1974-79
Who's Who in America; American Men and Women in Science; Who's Who in the World
Board of Directors, Bioengineering Society, 1977-79; Cardiovascular-Pulmonary Study Section, March 1979, 1980
Editorial Boards: J. Mol. & Cell Cardiol., 1975-80; Am. J. Physiol. (Heart and Circ. Physiol.), 1975-80; Circ. Research, 1982-1989; Cell Biology International, 2005- ; Molecular and Cellular Biomechanics, 2007-
Honorary member, Romanian Muscle Society, 1992
Excellence Award, Society for Technical Communication, 1992 (for the book Muscles & Molecules)
Founding Fellow, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, 1993
Consultant, Whitaker Foundation, 1996-2006
JSEM Scientific Paper Award, 1998
Fellow, American Heart Association, 2001
Inaugural Fellow, Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences, AHA, 2001
Invited Scholar, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Paris, 2002
Distinguished Lecturer Award, Biomedical Engineering Society, 2002
International Scientist of the Year (IBC), 2002
Honorary Doctorate, Ural State University, Ekaterinburg, Russia, 2002
Distinguished Award, Society for Technical Communication (for the book Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life), 2003
Merit Award, International STC competition for the book above, 2003
Chair (joint, founding), Gordon Research Conference on "Interfacial Water in Cell Biology", 2004
Honorary Professor, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2005
Fellow, Biomedical Engineering Society, 2005
National Science Board Task Force for Transformative Research, Advisor, 2005-2006
Inaugural Chair, Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry, and Biology of Water, 2006; Chair, 2007, 2009
University of Washington Annual Lectureship Award (selected among all University faculty), 2008
Founding Editor-in-Chief, WATER: A Multidisciplinary Research Journal
NIH Director's Transformative Research (R01) Award, 2009
Prigogine Medal
Emoto Peace Prize, 2016

Scientific contributions

The fourth phase of water

Main article: Fourth phase of water

Pollack's central claim is that the textbook account of water — three phases, solid, liquid and vapour — is incomplete. Next to hydrophilic (water-loving) surfaces, his laboratory finds a zone of water, often hundreds of micrometres deep, from which colloidal particles and dissolved solutes are almost completely excluded. Because of this exclusion the region was named the exclusion zone, or EZ. Pollack argues that the EZ is not merely a thin interfacial film of the kind conventional surface chemistry allows, but a distinct, ordered, semi-crystalline phase of water in its own right — hence "the fourth phase".

In his account the EZ is built from stacked hexagonal sheets whose stoichiometry is not H₂O but closer to H₃O₂, giving the zone a net negative charge. The protons displaced in forming this lattice accumulate in the ordinary bulk water just beyond it, which accordingly becomes positively charged and markedly more acidic — a drop of several pH units has been measured. Water at an interface therefore separates charge spontaneously.

Water as a battery, charged by light

The consequence Pollack emphasises is that a charge-separated EZ is, functionally, a battery. Placing one electrode in the exclusion zone and another in the bulk water beyond yields a measurable current, which his laboratory has used to do work. Because the separation is maintained by the structure itself — the bulky hydronium ions cannot penetrate the dense H₃O₂ network — the battery does not immediately discharge.

The energy that builds and sustains the zone, Pollack argues, comes from incident radiant energy. Visible and especially near-infrared light drive EZ growth in a strongly wavelength-dependent way, with infrared the most effective. Since infrared radiation is ubiquitous — radiated by every warm body, including the human one — the implication is that water is continuously absorbing ambient radiant energy and storing it as separated charge. This is the sense in which Pollack speaks of obtaining energy from water without contradiction of thermodynamics: the water is a transducer of light, not a source.

Implications for cells and biology

Pollack came to water through cell physiology, and his earlier book Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life argues the case that the cell should be understood not as a membrane-bounded bag of ordinary aqueous solution governed by pumps and channels, but as a gel — a matrix of proteins with structured water throughout. On this view many cellular phenomena conventionally explained by membrane pumps, ion gradients and dedicated molecular machinery follow more simply from phase transitions of the gel and of the water within it. Muscle contraction, cell division, secretion, nerve conduction and the resting potential are all treated in this framework, in keeping with his stated laboratory philosophy that "science is essentially simple" and that persistent complexity in an explanation is a symptom of a wrong foundation.

Extending the picture outward, Pollack has applied EZ water to phenomena as varied as the attraction observed between like-charged particles in solution, the cohesion of water in plant xylem, cloud droplet formation, and the flow of blood through capillaries. He has also argued for a role of structured water in human health, which has made his work widely discussed well beyond academic biophysics.

Position with respect to the mainstream

Pollack's proposals sit outside the consensus of physical chemistry, which generally holds interfacial ordering in water to extend only a few molecular layers, and his account has been contested. He has consistently engaged that criticism in the open literature rather than around it, and much of his effort — the journal WATER, the annual water conference, and the Institute for Venture Science — has gone into building the institutional space in which unorthodox but testable claims can be pursued and adjudicated at all. This concern with the sociology of scientific dissent, as much as the specific physics of water, is what makes his work of interest to the natural philosophy community.

Reception in the natural philosophy community

Pollack's work has been taken up with particular interest by the Electric Universe community, which reads the spontaneous charge separation of the exclusion zone as a demonstration that electrical structure arises unbidden in ordinary matter. He delivered a one-hour presentation, "Electrically Structured Water", at the EU2013 conference on 5 January 2013, hosted by the Thunderbolts Project, sharing the programme with Wallace Thornhill, David Talbott and others. He has since spoken in the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society seminar series.

Journal and conference

Pollack is founding Editor-in-Chief of WATER: A Multidisciplinary Research Journal, an open-access journal he created to serve as a common forum for the many disciplines that study water and that would otherwise never read one another. He also initiated the Annual Conference on the Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, first held in 2005 and running annually since, which gathers researchers on water from around the world.

CNPS talks

He has presented in the CNPS online seminar series:

"4th Phase of Water" (20 March 2021) — Water is known to have three phases: solid, liquid and vapor. Pollack presents the evidence for a fourth phase lying between solid and liquid, notes that the concept of an ordered fourth phase dates back at least a century, and samples its explanatory power across diverse disciplines.

Abstracts

2012 - "Batteries Made from Water" (Read in full)
2011 - "The Secret Life of Water: E = H2O"
2009 - "Mechanism of Attraction between Like-charged Particles in Aqueous Solution"

Works

The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor (Ebner and Sons, 2013)
Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life: A New, Unified Approach to Cell Function (Ebner and Sons, 2001)
Muscles and Molecules: Uncovering the Principles of Biological Motion (Ebner and Sons, 1990)

Media

"The Fourth Phase of Water" — TEDxGuelphU talk
2012 - Video lecture

External links