Academy of Sciences published his latest results, obtained under the supervision of Alfred Spira, a statistician, in its weekly Proceedings. Benveniste's article was labelled a "right of reply"— being downgraded from the status of an article. The study is a replication of early high dilution experiments. Benveniste gained the public support of Brian Josephson, a Nobel laureate physicist with a reputation for openness to paranormal claims. Experiments continued along the same basic lines, culminating with a 1997 paper claiming the effect could be transmitted over phone lines. This was followed by two additional papers in 1999 and another, in the controversial non-peer reviewed Medical Hypotheses, on remote-transmission in 2000 by which time it was claimed that it could also be sent over the Internet. Josephson challenged the American Physical Society (APS) to oversee a replication by Benveniste. This challenge was to be "a randomized double-blind test", of his claimed ability to transfer the characteristics of homeopathically altered solutions over the Internet. The APS accepted the challenge and offered to cover the costs of the test. When he heard of this, Randi offered to throw in the long-standing $1 million prize for any positive demonstration of the paranormal, to which Benveniste replied: "Fine to us." in his DigiBio NewsLetter. Randi later noted that Benveniste and Josephson did not follow up on their challenge, mocking their silence on the topic as if they were missing persons. Focus on the study was reignited in 2004 when an article was published in Inflammation Research, with researchers concluding that an effect did exist. Despite its critics, Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier, who was credited with identifying the AIDS virus, subsequently took up Benveniste's work on water memory, and he and a number of other scientists claimed to have successfully replicated Benveniste's experiments. Digital Biology In the nineties, Benveniste also asserted that water memory could be digitized, transmitted, and reinserted into another sample of water, which would then contain the same active qualities as the first sample. In 1997, he founded the company DigiBio to "develop and commercialise applications of Digital Biology." With the support of Josephson, the experiments continued, culminating in a 1997 paper claiming a water memory effect could be transmitted over phone lines. Two additional papers were published, one in 1999 and another in 2000. Intrigued by Benveniste's claims that biological interactions could be digitized, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) asked