The Senate Minority Report was generated with encouragement from a United States senator notorious for making bogus statements to the effect that “global warming is the biggest hoax perpetrated on the American People.” That claim is patent nonsense. Global warming over the past three decades is an observationally based scientific fact. Even the current period, cool only relative to the twenty-five-year rise ending in 2005, was predicted by the best climate models, which also predict that within a decade—and possibly much sooner—we will experience another sharp global temperature rise. Vetting a questionable report was the motivation for our Credibility Project, and no such motivation existed for us to vet the IPCC-2007 science report.

It still doesn’t. We were careful in defining what a climate scientist is, and our definition was rather broad. Whether the same definition was used by the scientist quoted by Sheaffer is not clear, but it is not hard to find a few contrarians willing to define terms to suit their conclusions. As for the number of scientists actually doing climate science, properly defined, even if “only” 620 appear as actual authors of the sections in IPCC-2007 science report, this work is supported by well over 2,000 climate scientists whose work in the peer-reviewed literature is referenced in that document.

As for the science itself, recalling that peer-reviewed science is a self-correcting process, not only has the predictive power of global climate science been confirmed, but actual observations of melting icecaps in Greenland and deteriorating conditions in the Arctic paint an even more dire picture than was available in the IPCC-2007 science report, as noted in our Credibility Project. In contrast, no scientific results based on observations have emerged to challenge the large consensus of the climate science community. Those who invoke the solar cycle, to which there is no global temperature correlation even if one allows for phase shifts, or who cite possible increases in solar flux, of which observations show none over this warming epoch, are especially off the mark. Yet many contrarians continue to propose the Sun as the dominant driver of global warming, possibly for lack of other hypotheses.

What about the cautious nature of the stated conclusions in our Credibility Project? We leave it to the reader to decide if we are pursuing “an agenda.” Consider our penultimate sentence, in which we make it clear that we are restricting ourselves to what we know best—the science: “The authors of this Credibility Project are not qualified to assess the engineering and economic questions associated with proposed legislation addressing climate change.”

At this point, it may be best to move the debate into the halls of Congress, where there is a huge scientific community prepared to defend the legitimacy of climate science against the small number of scientific claims to the contrary. I have had a civil exchange with one of the above critics of our project and think both Sheaffer and Posner are sincere in their skepticism. I also commend the Skeptical Inquirer for presenting both sides of this issue while reminding the reader that this does not imply equal weight to all positions when science is involved. Following the above quote from our conclusion is our final, summary statement on the Credibility Project: “We are disturbed by any document that may misrepresent the state of the global scientific effort to address this problem.”

We stand by that statement.

Both sides have made significant efforts to establish scientific credibility with the public... . Those favoring action rely heavily on the IPCC-2007 science report [by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change].... In contrast, [the office of dissenter] James Inhofe…the ranking Republican member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works ... has issued a ... report titled United States Senate Minority Report on Global Warming.... As of January 2009, the number of ... individuals identified [in the Report] as scientists who allegedly dissent over [man-made global warming] claims ... was 687 [including] some quite well-known scientists.

Jordan then discusses the efforts of CFI’s OPP to “vet the list [of 687 dissenting scientists] carefully to establish how credible it is overall.” Though he doesn’t mention its official name in the piece, the OPP dubbed this endeavor the “Credibility Project.” And, as Jordan relates, its findings appear devastating for the dissenters.

After thus laying the groundwork for the following ostensible no-brainer, Jordan ends by rhetorically asking “the skeptic who is not acquainted with the relevant science where he or she thinks the most credible scientific assessment lies—with the scientists whose published research is reported in the IPCC-2007 science report or with the much smaller group of scientists collected for the Senate minority report.”

Some background: In May 2009, CFI’s OPP had disseminated a “Dear Citizen” announcement about its upcoming July 18–21 Second Annual Civic Days at the Nation’s Capital (see inset). From its introductory paragraph: “You will hear about ... an OPP-sponsored project exposing fake ‘scientists’ who oppose global warming.” But two months later, in an invitation to the Credibility Project’s July 17 press conference at the National Press Club, the OPP no longer referred to the dissenting scientists as fake. When I inquired as to whether this reflected “an evolution on CFI’s part,” OPP executive director Toni Van Pelt replied, “It is true, Gary, that your many e-mails [I routinely copy her when corresponding on this subject] influenced my decision to commission this research.”

Because I harbor my own doubts about the existence of a man-made global warming crisis, I anxiously awaited the details of the Credibility Project’s assessment of the skeptical scientists. Its most significant finding constitutes the deck of Jordan’s piece: “CFI vets list of 687 ‘dissenting scientists’ in Senate minority report; 80 percent haven’t published peer-reviewed climate research.” Largely for this reason, in its July 17 press release, OPP concluded that its findings “expose a lack of credibility among dissenting scientists challenging man-made global warming.”

But in my follow-up to Toni, I explained why “it simply does not logically follow that [those skeptical scientists] necessarily lack the credibility to speak to the issues at hand,” any more than I lack the legitimacy to critique, for example, medical studies touting prayer and healing, as I have done in CFI-sponsored magazines despite never having published studies of my own in the peer-reviewed literature.

Speaking further to Jordan’s key point that “80 percent haven’t published peer-reviewed climate research,” Skeptical Inquirer columnist Robert Sheaffer e-mailed a letter to the editor (see page 64), which was copied to other interested parties (including Jordan and myself), pointing out that OPP also should have vetted the list of IPCC scientists, since perhaps as few as 20 percent of them have had any professional dealings with climate, much less published in the peer-reviewed climate literature.

In his e-mailed reply to Sheaffer (et al.), Jordan advises:

One of the favorite tactics of global warming deniers is to refer to the [IPCC’s summary] report for policymakers, which summarizes [their separate] science report [authored by 2,000 real climate scientists]. There [in the summary report] it is true that the majority are not climate scientists, because they are presenting a summary, that is based upon the science report, to government officials, in the language of policy recommendations. Clearly this is comparing apples and oranges. The IPCC-2007 report titled “The Physical Science Basis” is a true science report, written by and summarizing the work of approximately 2,000 real scientists.

However, Sheaffer’s letter compares apples to apples—he does not reference the “summary” report, authored by fifty-one members of the IPCC. In an addendum offered after Jordan’s initial response, Sheaffer points out that OPP apparently also failed to ascertain how many of the “2,000 real scientists” actually contributed to the writing of the science report (620), and how many of those have published in the relevant literature.

Thus it seems that the Credibility Project, conceived by CFI’s Office of Public Policy for the purpose of “exposing fake ‘scientists’” who dare dissent from the prevailing climate of climate-change alarmism, has some credibility problems of its own. After polishing the project’s clouded lens, as one again examines Jordan’s question about whether “the most credible scientific assessment lies ... with the [IPCC] scientists ... or with the ... scientists collected for the Senate minority report,” the answer doesn’t appear to be such a no-brainer after all.

En route to one of the last filming locations in Australia for his new documentary, Last Chance to See, Stephen Fry

snapped a quick photo from his hotel window and posted it on the popular online site Twitter. The whole Twittosphere immediately knew where he was, for the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was in the background. He was in Sydney but only for a short time. Within a few hours, I had contacted Mr. Fry’s agents and organized an interview.

Kylie Sturgess: You have just returned from a lengthy around-the-world investigation based upon Douglas Adams’s book Last Chance to See, written in 1990, which I use when teaching high-school English. What inspired you to recreate the journey that he and Mark Carwardine completed [when they teamed up to find out what was happening to exotic, endangered creatures worldwide—animals that they may never have gotten another chance to see]?

Stephen Fry: Douglas did describe it as his favorite book, and I think that was because it changed his life. [It was] his “second chapter,” if you like. He never had a third chapter because of his early death, but I know how important it was for him to go around the world and look at the extraordinary habitats and the rare creatures that relied on them. And caring for the disappearing species was something he devoted a lot of time to.

Now, what inspired me to recreate the journey was, firstly, that Douglas’s family asked me to; plus it was a desire I’ve always had to go into the wild. Like so many people of my generation I grew up on natural history on TV, and it never occurred to me that one day I would actually be looking at lions close by, that I’d be with hippopotamuses, gorillas, lemurs, rare birds, diving turtles, and all these amazing things ... blue whales breaching in front of your very eyes. It affected me profoundly, and it affected Douglas.

It’s very hard to say which was my most influential experience. There are one or two moments which bring one close to the most ecstatic euphoria that one can ever experience (without the use of pharmaceuticals or alcohol). I’d say it was seeing hundreds of green turtles hatching out of their nest and streaming over the dunes into the sea. This was off the coast of Malaysia.

It’s not until the female turtle is about twenty-five years old that she can lay eggs—that the “turtle is fertile,” as they’d say in America. She mates with the male and then she swims in—not necessarily on a moonlit night; there’s a great mistaken belief that this is keyed to some biodynamic phase of the Moon; it’s not actually true—to the place where she was born and crawls up the beach (not having been on land since she was born, she finds the place again using Earth’s magnetic field), lays 80 to 120 eggs and covers them up. And I was right beside this huge beautiful animal doing just that; she took 90 minutes to lay the eggs, an incredible sight, and then she lumbered back into the water.

Sturgess: In that documentary, apparently there’s an account of a healing ceremony in Madagascar, which is something you’ve touched upon before in your novel The Hippopotamus. Why do you think pseudoscientific claims, such as holistic healing, continue to pervade our society despite advances in medicine?

Fry: Well, my interpretation is no more valid than anyone else’s, but I would say in terms of medicine, people want to take control of their own lives, and ironically they seem to think that they are taking control of their lives more by using so-called complementary or alternative medicines than by using orthodox medicine. In other words, they think it’s a statement of originality and individuality. To you and me it seems self-evidently ridiculous, this homeopathic medicine. It is so preposterous, and yet some people I know and respect insist on believing it.

The powers of the placebo are so strong that it may be morally wrong to call homeopathy a lie because the moment you say it then a placebo falls to pieces and loses its power. I am a great believer in double-blind random testing, which is the basis of all drug testing. People still insist on things like holistic healing and things that have no real basis in evidence because they want it to be true—it’s as simple as that. If you’re dying of cancer or very, very ill, then you’ll cling to a straw. I feel pretty dark thoughts about the kind of people who throw straws at drowning, dying men and women, and I’m sure most of us would agree it’s a pretty lousy thing to do. Some of these people perhaps believe in the snake oil they sell or allow themselves to believe in it. That’s why James Randi is so good, because he knows what magicians know: if you do a card trick on someone, they will report that it was unbelievable, they describe the effect the magician wanted, and they miss out all the steps in between that seemed irrelevant because the magician made them irrelevant, so they didn’t notice them. People will swear that a clairvoyant mentioned the name of their aunt from nowhere, and they will be astonished if you then play a recording that shows that thirty-two names were said before the aunt’s name, none of which had any effect on them. That’s because they wanted to hear their aunt’s name; they wanted the trick to work, so they forgot all the failures in the same way as people forget all their dreams that have no relevance to their lives, but they mark when they dream of someone they haven’t met for ages that they see the next day. I would be astounded if everyone had coincidences like that—yet people say that is somehow closed-minded of me!

Sturgess: Of course, it’s not just the pseudosciences that pervade; there are also paranormal beliefs. I was wondering if you’re surprised that the same beliefs exist today?

Fry: No, I am not surprised. I hope I know enough about history and human nature to agree that there is one born every minute and to know that there is desperation to make sense of things, and making sense of the universe isn’t easy. Making sense of our own lives isn’t easy. There are different ways of doing it—by observing people, by reading novels and poetry, by looking at paintings, listening to music, allowing our minds to concentrate on the experiences we had and the observations we’ve made about how people behave. Then in a wider sense we can look at the world and make observations about how animals behave and what they look like and why they look like it, why rain falls, and all kinds of phenomena that occur, and we can do this by observation, experiment, repetition, and understanding. This is essentially what we call the scientific method, the empirical method, more importantly.

Or, we can cheat—we can just say “there’s an invisible person that makes it happen,” or the stars tell you, or it’s all predestined, or it’s something to do with an inborn power of the mind, which isn’t the power of learning. In other words, you can be lazy; instead of bothering to find how numbers work or observing how animals behave, you just say it’s all according to some cosmic vibration. Sad, but people naturally want to cut corners, much as water wants to go the shortest route to the sea, so human beings want to find the shortest route to the truth, but unfortunately that takes them to the great “ocean of bullshit” that lies out there and to all those people prepared to make money out of them. All the cold-reading clairvoyants and the nonsensical astrologers and absurd ESP merchants and other such people who talk about vibrations and energies.... God, if there’s a word that drives me mad it’s “energy” used in a nonsensical way—don’t get me started!

Let’s just say that, to me, the true mystery of the universe is something that is available to all, not through the arcane rules of some nonsensical, unprovable drivel—but is there for your eyes, it is there to see by just simply recognizing observable laws and repeatable instances of things like sunsets and how they work. And seeing what we’ve done on the basis of that understanding, so every time that you flick a light switch or turn on a GPS, you have to realize on what that GPS is predicated, on the science—without it the GPS couldn’t possibly work. The fact that Earth must be round, the fact that it must move at this speed, the fact that geostationary orbit means this, the fact that triangulation means that—all these things tell us so much how science is right.

Sturgess: You’re also the host of a TV show in the United Kingdom called Q.I., which stands for “Quite Interesting.” It’s been described as a “comedy panel quiz,” yet it could very well be called a show that questions illogical thinking and dangerous beliefs. Do you consider comedy to be a “way in” for people to challenge irrational thinking?

Fry: Comedy is always about the real world. Philosophers or religionists will make a pompous, abstract statement and a comedian will say, “Is that true on a Wednesday?” Comedians want a cut and dried example of the facts of the world. Because comedy is about observation—as is science—it’s about repeatable patterns, and it’s testing some statement that may be preposterous or may be true. Statements made of grandeur and abstract truth are always tested by comedians, so in that sense, comedy is a very good way to get the credulous onside, if you like. Because it says “Is that true? Is it really true? Let’s see!”

Sturgess: Finally, your love of technology is well known—you’ve written for many years on technology in a variety of publications; you have a very popular podcast called Podgrams that is available on your Web site and on iTunes. Recently you’ve embraced Twitter and written about the experience and have been the focus of media attention because of it. Do you think that your love of technology is an important part of your appeal to your audience? And what do you hope for technological advances in the future?

Fry: My audiences all share an interest in technology because those that don’t have stopped being my audience. It’s about what one hopes for and what happens. Of course like everyone else I hope for 3-D television and for fantastic robots I can have sex with that then turn into machines that clean my room! I’m a human being—I want slavish satisfaction; I want joy and pleasure to be brought to me by the machines. But I also love the connections that technology gives me with other people. I am worried about privacy and that one day the machines might stop and we won’t know what to do with ourselves and not be able to cope! So my hope for technology is that it will continue to be free and open and will become dominated not by business interests as now, not by politicians, religious fundamentalists, or maniacs, but by the general sum of humanity, whom I think to be good and enlightened for the most part.

I know there are dark and hideous slimy corners of the Internet, but one is able to avoid them. The Internet is like a great city; of course it has slums and red-light districts and weird temples and strange churches, but it also has grand cultural palaces, remarkable museums and libraries, places of entertainment, shops and stores, and exciting parks.

After more than sixty years of experimentation, researchers have failed to reach a consensus about the existence of psi (psychic ability). Some argue that there exists overwhelming evidence either for or against the psi hypothesis, while others believe that it simply isn’t possible to answer the question one way or the other. One of the main obstacles to closure on the psi question involves the way in which null results are viewed (Alcock 2003). Many parapsychologists have adopted a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to their work, viewing positive results as supportive of the psi hypothesis while ensuring that null results do not count as evidence against it.

Cherry-Picking New Procedures

Parapsychologists frequently create and test new experimental procedures in an attempt to produce laboratory evidence for psi. Most of these studies do not yield significant results. However, rather than being seen as evidence against the existence of psychic ability, such null findings are usually attributed to the experiment being carried out under conditions that are not psi-conducive. They are either never published (the “filedrawer effect,” see Douglas M. Stokes, “The Shrinking File­drawer,” SI, May/June 2001) or are quietly forgotten even if they make it into a journal or conference proceeding. Once in a while one of these studies produces significant results. Such studies frequently contain potential methodological artifacts, in part because they are using new procedures that have yet to be scrutinized by the research community. In addition, the evidential status of these positive findings is problematic to judge because they have emerged from a mass of nonsignificant studies. Nevertheless, they are more likely than nonsignificant studies to be presented at a conference or published in a journal, usually viewed by proponents as tentative evidence for psi, acting as a catalyst for further work.

To my knowledge, only one paper has revealed an insight into the potential scale of this problem. Watt (2006) summarized all of the psi-related final-year undergraduate projects that have been supervised by staff at Edinburgh University’s Koestler Parapsychology Unit between 1987 and 2007. Watt tracked down thirty-eight projects, twenty-seven of which predicted overall significant performance on a psi task with the remainder predicting significant differences between experimental conditions. The work examined a range of new and established procedures, including, for example, dowsing for a hidden penny, the psychokinetic control of a visual display of a balloon being driven by a fan onto spikes, presentiment of photographs depicting emotional facial expressions, detecting the emotional state of a sender in a telepathy experiment, ganzfeld studies, and card guessing. Interestingly, Watt’s paper also demonstrated a reporting bias. Only seven of the thirty-eight studies had made it into the public domain, presented as papers at conferences held by the Parapsychological Association. All of these papers had predicted overall significant performance on the psi task. There was a strong tendency for parapsychologists to make public those studies that had obtained positive findings, with just over 70 percent (five out of seven) of the studies presented at conferences showing an overall significant result, versus just 15 percent (three out of twenty) of those that remained unreported. Watt’s analysis, although informative, underestimates the total number of psi-related studies undertaken at Edinburgh University because it did not include projects undertaken by students prior to their final year, experiments run by postgraduate students and staff, or any work conducted before 1987. Multiply these figures by the number of parapsychologists who have conducted and supervised psi research across the world over the last sixty years or so, and the scale of the issue becomes apparent.

Explain Away Unsuccessful Attempted Replications

If a procedure seems to yield significant psi effects, additional follow-up studies using that procedure are conducted. Although these additional studies occasionally take the form of strict replications, they usually involve some form of variation. If these follow-up studies obtain significant results, they are often the subject of considerable debate: proponents argue that the findings represent evidence of psi, and skeptics scrutinize the work for possible methodological and statistical shortcomings. However, any failure to replicate can be attributed to the procedural modifications rather than to the nonexistence of psi. Perhaps the most far-reaching version of this “get out of a null effect free” card involves an appeal to the “experimenter effect,” wherein any negative findings are attributed to the psi-inhibited nature of the parapsychologist running the study.

This nullifying of null findings permeates parapsychological literature. For example, Kanthamani and Broughton (1994) report a large-scale attempt to replicate the alleged ganzfeld telepathy effect, wherein one participant (referred to as a receiver) experiences a mild form of sensory deprivation and is then asked to identify a target being viewed by another person (a sender) in a distant location. Parapsychologists have employed various types of targets in these experiments, including photographs and drawings (static targets) and video clips (dynamic targets). In the studies described by Kanthamani and Broughton, the target material consisted of randomly chosen pictures (mainly postcard-sized art prints). The project involved a huge amount of work: researchers ran a series of experiments over a six-year period and conducted more than 350 individual ganzfeld sessions. The studies yielded a nonsignificant cumulative effect. However, Kanthamani and Broughton spent no time discussing whether this null finding might act as evidence against the psi hypothesis and instead simply concluded that “it is probably safe to say that static picture targets remain a less than ideal choice for ganzfeld experiments.”

Once again, this process represents the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle. Successful replications are seen as evidence of psi, while null results are attributed to the non-psi-conducive conditions under which the replication was carried out.

Data Mining

In addition to explaining away null findings via allegedly failed procedural modifications, some parapsychologists also adopt an “any anomaly will do” attitude and data mine in an attempt to produce some kind of psi-related result. Although such post hoc data mining might help guide future work, it has little if any evidential value. Nevertheless, parapsychologists often present it as tentative evidence in support of the psi hypothesis.

Willin’s (1996) description of his ganzfeld psi studies presents a striking example of this process at work. Willin conducted one hundred ganzfeld sessions over a fifteen-month period, taking the unusual step of using musical clips as targets. The study obtained a nonsignificant result. However, rather than explore whether this null finding counts as evidence against the psi hypothesis, Willin conducted a series of post hoc analyses, exploring, for example, the relationship between participants’ psi scores and their age, profession, hobbies, previous paranormal experiences, and relationship with the person acting as the sender. Additional analyses explored psi scoring as a function of the month and time of day each trial was conducted. Most of these analyses yielded inconclusive results, but Willin eventually found that trials conducted early in the experiment obtained a higher hit rate than those conducted later and suggested that this might have been due to “less interest being shown by the Receivers and the Senders or by an unintentional goat effect being displayed by the Experimenter.”

This type of data mining again shows the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle in action, with any null effects being nullified by the apparent discovery of post hoc findings.

Meta-Analyses and Retrospective Data Selection

After several studies have been conducted using a new procedure, parapsychologists usually carry out some form of meta-analytic review of the work. If the combined outcome of the studies is significant, the meta-analysis is usually the subject of considerable debate, with proponents believing that the finding represents evidence of psi and skeptics arguing that it may have a normal explanation (including, for example, publication bias, inappropriate inclusion criteria, and poor methodology). However, if the cumulative effect is nonsignificant, parapsychologists often attribute this null effect to the non-psi-conducive procedural variations described in the preceding section.

Perhaps more important, the procedurally heterogeneous collection of studies usually presents parapsychologists with an opportunity to “explain away” overall null effects by retrospectively identifying a subset of studies that used a certain procedure and yielded a significant cumulative effect.

A striking illustration of this occurred in the late 1990s during a meta-analytic debate surrounding the ganzfeld psi studies. In 1999, Milton and Wiseman published a meta-analysis of all ganzfeld studies that were begun after 1987 and published by the start of 1997, and they noted that the cumulative effect was both small and nonsignificant (Milton and Wiseman 1999). Some parapsychologists criticized this analysis, arguing that they had included all of the ganzfeld studies conducted during this period and that they should have instead focused on those that had employed a “standard” procedure developed by parapsychologist Charles Honorton and his colleagues during a seminal set of ganzfeld studies conducted at the Psychophysical Research Laboratory (PRL) in the late 1980s. The difficulties with this approach became clear when researchers were unable to settle on what would constitute a “standard” set of procedures (Schmeidler and Edge 1999). Eventually, Bem, Palmer, and Broughton (2001) set out to tackle this issue experimentally, asking several people to rate the degree to which the studies in our analysis had employed Honorton’s “standard” ganzfeld procedure and then correlating their ratings against the effect size of each study. Rather than provide their own description of this “standard” procedure, Bem, Palmer, and Broughton had the raters read relevant sections in two previous papers describing the PRL studies. However, they also added a series of additional conditions, informing their raters, for example:

You should treat as standard the use of artistic or creative subject samples (as one of the most successful components of the PRL experiments used such a sample) or subjects having had previous psi experiences or having practiced a mental discipline such as meditation (as such subjects were shown to be the best scorers in the PRL experiments).

The addition of participant selection as an allegedly “standard” condition was not mentioned in the method section of either of the papers describing the PRL work. As such, it could be seen as an excellent example of retrospective data fitting, wherein parapsychologists decide which studies to analyze (or, in this instance, the weight assigned to them) on the basis of their known outcome.

Once again, it’s the “heads I win, tails you lose” principle. A significant overall effect is seen as evidence for psi while a null effect initiates post hoc searching for pockets of significance.

Decline Effects and Jumping Ship

The alleged psi effects associated with a certain procedure frequently have a curious habit of fading over the course of repeated experimentation. Skeptics argue that this is due to the parapsychologists identifying and minimizing potential methodological and statistical flaws over time. However, some parapsychologists have come up with creative ways of explaining away this potential threat, arguing that such decline effects are either an inherent property of psi or that psychic ability really does exist but is inversely related to the level of experimental controls employed in a study (see Kennedy 2003 for a review of this approach).

The decrease in alleged psi often causes some parapsychologists to abandon ship in search of a new procedure, placing them back at square one, ready to repeat history. This is not a new observation. For example, writing over thirty years ago, parapsychologist Joseph Gaither Pratt noted:

One could almost pick a date at random since 1882 and find in the literature that someone somewhere had recently obtained results described in terms implying that others should be able to confirm the findings.... One after another, however, the specific ways of working used in these initially successful psi projects have fallen out of favor and faded from the research scene—except for the latest investigations which, one may reasonably suppose, have not yet had enough time to falter and fade away as others before them have done. (Pratt 1978)

This constant “ship jumping” is one of the defining features of psi research, with new paradigms emerging every decade or so. Take, for example, the different trends in ESP research that have emerged over the years. Initial work, conducted between the early 1930s and late 1950s, primarily involved card guessing experiments in which people were asked to guess the identity of specially printed playing cards carrying one of five simple symbols. By the mid-1960s parapsychologists had realized that such studies were problematic to replicate and so turned their attention to dream telepathy and the possibility of participants predicting the outcome of targets selected by machines. In the mid 1970s and early 1980s, the ganzfeld experiments and remote viewing took over as dominant paradigms. In 1987, a major review of the area by parapsychologists K. Ramakrishna Rao and John Palmer argued that two sets of ESP studies provided the best evidence for the replicability of psi: the ganzfeld experiments and the differential ESP effect (wherein participants apparently score above chance in one condition of an experiment and below chance in another). More recently, parapsychologists have shifted their attention to alleged presentiment effects, wherein participants appear to be responding to stimuli before they are presented. Finally, there are now signs that the next new procedure is likely to adopt a neuropsychological perspective, focusing on EEG measurements or functional MRI scans as people complete psi tasks.

Conclusion

Parapsychologists have tended to adopt a “heads I win, tails you lose” approach to their work, viewing positive results as supportive of the psi hypothesis while ensuring that null results do not count as evidence against it. This involves cherry-picking new procedures from a mass of chance results, varying any allegedly “successful” procedures and then blaming these variations for any lack of replication, searching for pockets of post hoc significance whenever a meta-analysis produces a null result, explaining away decline effects as an inherent property of psi, and finally jumping to the next new promising procedure. This giddy process results in an ambiguous dataset that, just like the classic optical illusion of the old hag and attractive young woman, never contains enough information to allow closure in one direction or the other.

To help the field move forward and rapidly reach closure on the psi question, parapsychologists need to make four important changes in the way they view null findings. First, they should stop trying lots of new procedures and cherry-picking those that seem to work and instead identify one or two that have already yielded the most promising results. Second, rather than varying procedures that appear successful, they should instead have a series of labs carry out strict replications that are both methodologically sound and incorporate the most psi-conducive conditions possible. Third, researchers should avoid the temptation for retrospective meta-analysis by pre-registering the key details involved in each of the studies. And finally, researchers need to stop jumping ship from one experimental procedure to another and instead have the courage to accept the null hypothesis if the selected front-runners don’t produce evidence of a significant and replicable effect.

I hope that this process will help consign the psi debate to the history books and parapsychologists will no longer find themselves sitting on the fence arguing the “there is enough evidence to justify further work but not enough to conclude one way or the other” position. Rather than nullify null results, experimenters should be brave enough to give it their best shot and finally discover whether psi actually exists.

References

• Alcock, J.E. 2003. Give the null hypothesis a chance: Reasons to remain doubtful about the existence of psi. In Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal, ed. J. Alcock, J. Burns, and A. Freeman, 29–50. Charlottes­ville, VA: Imprint Academic.
• Bem, D.J., J. Palmer, and R.S. Broughton. 2001. Updating the ganzfeld database: A victim of its own success? Journal of Parapsychology 65: 207–218.
• Kennedy, J.E. 2003. The capricious, actively evasive, unsustainable nature of psi: A summary and hypotheses. Journal of Parapsychology 67: 53–74.
• Kanthamani, H., and R.S. Broughton. 1994. Institute for Parapsychology ganzfeld-ESP experiments: The manual series. Proceedings of Presented Papers: The Parapsychological Association 37th annual convention, 182–189.
• Milton, J., and R. Wiseman. 1999. Does psi exist? Lack of replication of an anomalous process of information transfer. Psychological Bulletin 125: 387–391.
• Pratt, J.G. 1978. Prologue to a debate: Some assumptions relevant to research in parapsychology. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 72: 127–139.
• Rao, K.R., and J.R. Palmer. 1987. The anomaly called psi: Recent research and criticism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 539–51.
• Schmeidler, G.R., and H. Edge. 1999. Should ganzfeld research continue to be crucial in the search for a replicable psi effect? Part II. Edited ganzfeld debate. Journal of Parapsychology 63: 335–388.
• Watt, C. 2006. Research assistants or budding scientists? A review of 96 undergraduate student projects at the Koestler Parapsychology Unit. Journal of Parapsychology 70: 335–356.
• Willin, M. J. 1996. A ganzfeld experiment using musical targets. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research 61: 1–17.

Chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, and other alternative medicine practitioners constantly criticize conventional medicine for “only treating the symptoms,” while alternative medicine allegedly treats “the underlying causes” of disease.

Nope. Not true. Exactly backwards. Think about it: When you go to a doctor with a fever, does he just treat the symptom? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the fever. If it’s pneumonia, he identifies which microbe is responsible and gives you the right drugs to treat that particular infection. If you have abdominal pain, does the doctor just give you narcotics to treat the symptom of pain? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the pain. If he determines you have acute appendicitis, he operates to remove your appendix.

I guess what they’re trying to say is that something must have been wrong in the first place to allow the disease to develop. But they don’t have any better insight into what that something might be than scientific medicine. All they have is wild, imaginative guesses. And they all disagree with one another. The chiropractor says that if your spine is in proper alignment, you can’t get sick. Acupuncturists talk about the proper flow of qi through the meridians. Energy medicine practitioners talk about disturbances in energy fields. Nutrition faddists claim that people who eat right won’t get sick. None of them can produce any evidence to support these claims. No alternative medicine has been scientifically shown to prevent disease or cure it. If it had, it would have been incorporated into conventional medicine and would no longer be “alternative.”

Are these practitioners treating the underlying cause, or are they simply applying their one chosen tool to treat everything? Chiropractors treat every patient with chiropractic adjustments. What if a doctor used one treatment for everything? You have pneumonia? Here’s some penicillin. You have a broken leg? Here’s some penicillin. You have diabetes? Here’s some penicillin. Acupuncturists only know to stick needles in people. Homeopaths only know to give out ridiculously high dilutions that amount to nothing but water. Therapeutic touch practitioners only know to smooth out the wrinkles in imaginary energy fields. They are not trying to determine any underlying cause; they are just using one treatment indiscriminately.

How do you define “cause”? We don’t know what causes gravity, but we understand enough about how it works to overcome it with elevators, airplanes, and rockets to the moon. We may not know what ultimately causes asthma, but we know enough about the causes of airway constriction and inflammation to devise effective treatments.

Let’s take a simple example: strep throat. The symptom is throat pain. Doctors don’t just treat the pain; they do a throat culture, they determine that a strep infection is causing the pain, and they treat the infection with an antibiotic. But what caused the strep infection? The body had to host the bacteria and respond to their presence by developing symptoms; the bacteria had to be capable of multiplying in the human body. The patient had to be exposed to another person who had a strep infection, who in turn had caught it from someone else, involving a chain of social and epidemiologic causes. The bacteria had to evolve from ancestor bacteria and the human from ancestor animals. And so on.

So you see, it involves a chain of causation and there can even be several simultaneous causes. “Cause” can mean pretty much anything you want it to. But however you look at it, doctors definitely do not “just treat symptoms.”

Philosophy has studied causation. Aristotle said everything had four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. And he introduced complications: proper (prior) causation and accidental (chance) causation. Potential or actual, particular or generic. Reciprocal or circular causality as a relation of mutual dependence or influence of cause upon effect. The same thing as the cause of contrary effects when its presence and absence result in different outcomes. He recognized that the subject of causation was complicated.

Alternative providers are more “simple” minded. They often claim to know the one true cause of all disease, which is curious because medical science defines several categories of causes falling under the mnemonic VINDICATE:

V – Vascular

I – Infectious/inflammatory

N – Neoplastic

D – Drugs/toxins

I – Intervention/iatrogenic

C – Congenital/developmental

A – Autoimmune

T – Trauma

E – Endocrine/metabolic

And sometimes more than one cause is involved (e.g., a traumatic injury gets infected). Where science finds complexity, alternative medicine imagines simplicity. As H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple—and wrong.”

Some homeopaths claim to treat “genetic” illness, tracing its origins to six main genetic causes: tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, psora (scabies), cancer, and leprosy. Bet you didn’t know tuberculosis was genetic! Neither did I. Science classifies all these as infectious except for cancer, which is neoplastic. Homeopathy disregards science and redefines genetic to suit its own inscrutable purposes.

Science finds many causes for disease and sometimes more than one cause for a given disease. Pseudoscience has identified the one true cause of all disease—many times. I did an Internet search and found sixty-seven single causes of all disease (see accompanying box). This is not an exhaustive list but rather an exhausted list (I stopped when I got tired of searching).

It never seems to bother proponents of alternative medicine that others have found different “one true” causes. In his book Voodoo Science, Bob Park describes a press conference following a meeting to discuss government funding for alternative medicine research:

Perhaps the strangest part of the press conference consisted of brief statements by individual members of the editorial review board of what they saw as the most important issues for the Office of Alternative Medicine. One insisted that the number-one health problem in the United States is magnesium deficiency; another was convinced that the expanded use of acupuncture could revolutionize medicine; and so it went around the table, with each touting his or her preferred therapy. But there was no sense of conflict or rivalry. As each spoke, the others would nod in agreement. The purpose of the OAM, I began to realize, was to demonstrate that these disparate therapies all work. It was my first glimpse of what holds alternative medicine together: there is no internal dissent in a community that feels itself besieged from the outside.

When scientists encounter two mutually exclusive claims, it bothers them. They experience cognitive dissonance and try diligently to find evidence to reject one of the hypotheses and leave a winner. They eventually reach a consensus. Alternative medicine pseudoscientists don’t seem to mind cognitive dissonance. They are content to look for evidence to support their own chosen treatment while blithely disregarding competing claims. They don’t want to look for evidence that something doesn’t work. While each claims to know the one cause of disease, they don’t seem interested in looking for the one truth.

Live and let live? Create your own reality? Truth is only relative? The same thing may be simultaneously true for me and false for you? Maybe it boils down to a mutual tolerance of delusions (okay, I’ll believe that you are Jesus if you believe that I’m Napoleon). For the cynical, follow the money: “I won’t interfere with your livelihood if you don’t interfere with mine.”

I can play the cause-finding game too. I’ve discovered the one cause of all the one-cause theories: a deficiency of critical-thinking skills combined with an overactive imagination. And, of course, a failure to test beliefs using the scientific method.

In 1971, President Nixon and Congress declared war on cancer. Since then, the federal government has spent well over $105 billion on the effort (Kolata 2009b). What have we gained from that huge investment? David Nathan, a well-known professor and administrator, maintains in his book The Cancer Treatment Revolution (2007) that we have made substantial progress. However, he greatly overestimates the potential of the newer so-called “smart drugs.” Re­searchers Psyrri and De Vita (2008) also claim important progress. However, they cherry-pick the cancers with which there has been some progress and do not discuss the failures. Moreover, they only discuss the last decade rather than a more balanced view of 1950 or 1975 to the present.

On the other hand, Gina Kolata pointed out in The New York Times that the cancer death rate, adjusted for the size and age of the population, has decreased by only 5 percent since 1950 (Kolata 2009a). She argues that there has been very little overall progress in the war on cancer.

In this article, I will focus on adult cancer, since child cancer makes up less than 1 percent of all cancer diagnosed. I will then place the facts in proper perspective after an overview of the epidemiology, diagnosis, and treatment (especially with smart drugs) of adult cancer in the United States.

The Cancer Facts

Figure 1 shows the ten biggest killers in the United States in 2006. Cancer (23 percent) has almost caught up with heart disease. Figure 2 shows the death rates from cancer in men and women (adjusted for the size and age of the population) since 1975; the cancer death rates have declined in men but not in women. The decline in men is largely due to fewer lung cancer deaths in men due to less smoking (see figure 3). However, there were about 200,000 more deaths from cancer in 2006 than 1975 because of the substantial increase in the U.S. population.

These summary statistics show that the war on cancer has not gone well. This is in marked contrast to death rates from stroke and cardiovascular disease (adjusted for the age and size of the population), which have fallen by 74 percent and 64 percent, respectively, from 1950 through 2006; and by 60 percent and 52 percent, respectively, from 1975 through 2006 (Kolata 2009a). These excellent results against stroke and heart disease are mainly due to improvements in drug therapy, especially the control of high blood pressure to prevent stroke and the use of statins, aspirin, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, and ACE inhibitors (now all generic) to prevent and treat heart disease. Cancer therapy is clearly decades behind. However, these data conceal a great deal of useful information and do not provide guidance on how to make progress against cancer.

Methodological Issues

To understand the issues, we must describe a few statistical traps and define our terms (see table 1). For example, there are several types of detection bias. First, if one discovers a malignant tumor very early and starts therapy immediately, even if the therapy is worthless, it will appear that the patient lives longer than a second patient (with an identical tumor) treated with another worthless drug if the cancer in the second patient was detected later. Second, detection bias can also occur with small tumors, especially of the breast and prostate, that would not harm the patient if left untreated but can lead to unnecessary and sometimes mutilating therapy. Another type is publication bias, whereby positive studies (especially those funded by the pharmaceutical industry) tend to be published while negative studies do not.

What is cancer? Cancer is a large group of diseases characterized by the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells locally, regionally, and/or distantly (metastatically) (American Cancer Society 2009). A carcinoma (cancer) in situ is a small cancer that has not invaded the local tissue. Some cancers grow very slowly, and the patient may survive for ten years or more with minimal treatment. Other cancers (e.g., lung and pancreas) grow quickly and, even today, kill more than half of the patients in less than one year (see table 2) (American Cancer Society 2009). The therapy for cancer is generally surgery, if possible, and/or chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy. Chemo­therapy aims to kill the cancer cells, but most chemotherapeutic drugs are nonspecific and also kill sensitive normal cells, especially in the intestine and bone marrow. Radiation therapy is also nonspecific. In chemotherapy and radiation therapy, a partial response is defined as shrinkage of the tumor in each dimension by 50 percent; a complete response means no detectable tumor, but this does not necessarily mean a “cure.” Many complete responses are only transitory. Median survival is the length of time in which one-half of the patients in a cohort die.

What Do We Know about Cancer?

The “causes” of cancer are shown in table 3 (American Cancer Society 2009), though there is still much we don’t know. For example, we do not know exactly how smoking causes cancer; in most cases, we do not know how “acquired” mutations cause cancer. In some cancers, there are more than five hundred identifiable genetic abnormalities—no one knows which one(s), if any, is “causative” (Downing 2009). The importance of epigenetic changes is currently speculative. It is quite possible that there is a completely unknown causal mechanism in many cancers.

The diagnosis of cancer today is relatively straightforward with imaging techniques (x-ray, CAT, MRI, PET) and biopsies that are subjected to routine histology, electron microscopy, and immunological techniques.

Cancer Therapy

To have a reasonable discussion of cancer therapy, we need to agree on the objectives of therapy (Fojo and Grady 2009), as shown in table 4. Everyone agrees that meaningful prolongation of life, preferably complete surgical removal of the tumor and cure, is a high priority. The treatment should also improve the quality of life. But, as is well known, many chemotherapeutic and radiation regimens cause mild to devastating—even fatal—side effects. Nathan (2007) compares conventional chemotherapy to “carpet-bombing,” an extreme but realistic metaphor. Finally, the results of a cost-benefit analysis must be reasonable (Fojo and Grady 2009). (In some cases, justifiably and importantly, chemotherapy and/or radiation and/or other drugs are used as palliative measures exclusively to counter symptoms from the disease [e.g., pleural effusions in the chest cavity or bone pain] or from the treatments [e.g., vomiting, mucositis, low white blood counts, heart failure, nerve damage, diarrhea, and/or inflammation of the bladder]). In the final analysis, what counts are the criteria in table 4. Partial or even complete remissions, unless they prolong life and/or improve the overall quality of life at a reasonable cost, are scientifically interesting but of little use to the patient.

Currently there are a few metastatic cancers that can sometimes be cured with chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, but unfortunately these cures make up a very small percentage of the whole cancer problem. These cancers include testicular cancer, choriocarcinoma, Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, leukemia, and rare cases of breast and ovarian cancer. A few cancers can be made into chronic diseases that require daily treatment, e.g., chronic myelogenous leukemia.

Returning to table 2, lung cancer, the most common cancer, is a devastating disease; if the surgeon cannot totally remove it, the diagnosis is grim. In fact, about 60 percent of lung cancer patients are dead within one year of diagnosis with the best available therapy, and only 15 percent survive five years.

There has been some progress in the death rate from colo­rectal cancer (figures 4 and 5), especially in women. This is mainly due to earlier diagnosis and surgical therapy.

Cancer of the breast is often a slow cancer and has a five- to ten-year median survival rate with just surgical therapy. As can be seen in figure 5, there has been a modest decline in death rates from breast cancer since 1975. It is worth noting that currently, if the breast cancer is metastatic, five-year survival is only 27 percent (American Cancer Society 2009). However, breast cancer presents a serious dilemma. Early detection of invasive breast cancer by screening is good; however, about 62,000 cases of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) are also discovered every year (American Cancer Society 2009). In greater than 50 percent of these women, especially older women, these lesions will not progress and do not need treatment. However, it is difficult to predict who will not need therapy, so the American Cancer Society (2009) recommends all patients with DCIS undergo therapy—generally breast surgery. Thus, more than thirty thousand patents annually are unnecessarily treated (Evans et al. 2009). We need to figure out which DCIS are harmless in order to avoid unnecessary treatment. On balance, I feel that breast cancer screening has a small but positive net benefit (Esserman et al. 2009).

Pancreatic cancer is devastating (see table 2 and figures 4 and 5), and little progress has been made against it since 1975. Pancreatic cancer is very challenging because the tumors are surrounded by dense fibrous connective tissue with few blood vessels (Olson and Hanahan 2009). Because of this, it is difficult to deliver drugs to pancreatic tumors. Moreover, this explains in part why chemotherapy is so ineffective for pancreatic cancer (see table 2). Better animal models are needed.

Prostate cancer mortality has declined slightly since 1975 with an unexplained increase in the mid-1990s (see figure 4). But prostate cancer therapy also presents a serious quandary. At autopsy, approximately 30 percent (or more) of men have cancer foci in their prostate glands, yet only 1 to 2 percent of men die of prostate cancer. Thus less than 10 percent of prostate cancer patients require treatment. This presents a serious dilemma: whom should the physician treat? Moreover, recently, two large studies of prostate cancer screening with prostate specific antigen (PSA) have seriously questioned the utility of screening. In one study, the investigators had to screen over a thousand men before they saved one life. This led t o about fifty “false positive” patients who often underwent surgery and/or radiation therapy unnecessarily (Schröder et al. 2009). The second study, conducted in the United States, was negative (Andriole et al. 2009), i.e., no lives were saved due to the screening, but many of the screening-positive patients with prostate cancer were treated. Welch and Albertson (2009) and Brawley (2009) estimate that more than a million men in the U.S. have been unnecessarily treated for prostate cancer between 1986 and 2005, due to over-diagnostic PSA screening tests. In the end, screening for prostate cancer will not be useful until methods are developed to determine which prostate cancers detected by screening will harm the patient (Welch and Albertson 2009; Brawley 2009). Many men—especially elderly ones—with a histological diagnosis of prostate cancer elect “watchful waiting” with no therapy, a rational strategy (Esserman et al. 2009).

There are many other things we do not understand about cancer—even on a phenomenological level. For example, in the United States, the incidence and death rates from cancer of the stomach have fallen dramatically since 1930 (see figures 4 and 5). The reason for this is unknown but may be due to changes in food preservation; it is not due to treatment.

Smart Drugs

David Nathan (2007) extols the virtues and potential of the new “smart drugs.” Smart drugs are defined as drugs that focus on a particular vulnerability of the cancer; they are not generalized but rather specific toxins. But the Journal of the American Medical Association (Health Agencies Update 2009) reports that 90 percent of the drugs or biologics approved by the FDA in the past four years for cancer (many of them smart drugs) cost more than $20,000 for twelve weeks of therapy, and many offer a survival benefit of only two months or less (Fojo and Grady 2009). Let us take bevacizumab (Avastin), the ninth largest selling drug in America ($4.8 billion in 2008), costing about $8,000 per month per patient (Keim 2008). Bevacizumab, a putative smart drug, is an intravenous man-made antibody that blocks the action of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEFG). It sometimes works because tumors (and normal tissues) release VEFG to facilitate small blood vessel in-growth into the tumor. These small blood vessels “nourish” the tumor (or normal tissue). The idea is to “starve” the growing tumor with once or twice monthly intravenous injections of bevacizumab.

The FDA has approved bevacizumab for the cancers listed in table 5 (Physicians Desk Reference [PDR] 2009; Health Agencies Update 2009). Since the median survival of colorectal cancer is eighteen months, bevacizumab therapy would cost about $144,000 (in such a patient) for four months prolongation of survival (Keim 2008). In the other cancers in table 4, there is no prolongation of survival. Moreover, bevacizumab can have terrible side effects, including gastrointestinal perforations, serious bleeding, severe hypertension, clot formation, and delayed wound healing (PDR 2009). By the criteria in table 4, bevacizumab is at best a marginal drug. It only slightly prolongs life, demonstrable only in colorectal cancer, has serious side effects, and is very expensive.

Bevacizumab is frequently cited as an example of the so-called newer smart drugs. But by interfering with small blood vessel growth throughout the body, it is a nonspecific toxin—and hence has serious side effects. It is not so different from the older non-specific chemotherapy.

The use of bevacizumab and similar drugs raises another issue. According to Gina Kolata, 60 to 80 percent of oncologists’ revenue comes from infusion of anti-cancer drugs in their offices. Many believe that such economic incentives are the reason for the substantial overuse of expensive chemotherapeutic drugs (Kolata 2009c). However, it is very difficult to document the extent of the overuse of cancer chemotherapy. Does it make sense to employ such expensive drugs that do not prolong life (see table 5) and have such serious side effects (Fojo and Grady 2009)? Moreover, although VEGF and bevacizumab are interesting science, there has been gross exaggeration of bevacizumab’s clinical utility in the press (see tables 4 and 5).

So why does the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve bevacizumab (and other drugs) that do not improve longevity and/or the quality of life (see table 5)? The answer is that bevacizumab coupled with other drugs can cause partial remissions, “stabilization” of the cancer, or “lack of progression” for several months. However, this often does not lead to prolongation of life in most of the cancers in table 5. Moreover, many patients pay a heavy price in terms of side effects and cost. It is also worth noting that several European national regulatory authorities do not accept the utility of some of these smart drugs and do not license them for sale in their countries. In agreement with the Europeans, scientists at the U.S. National Cancer Institute are urging the oncology community, regulators, and the public to set limits on the use and pricing of such marginal drugs (Fojo and Grady 2009). They view the current situation as unsustainable.

Why Has the War on Cancer Failed?

As documented above, unlike the successes against heart disease and stroke, the war on cancer, after almost forty years, must be deemed a failure with a few notable exceptions (Watson 2009). Why? Is it because cancer is an incredibly tough problem, or are there other explanations? In table 6, I have listed six reasons for the failure, although there is little doubt that effective, safe therapy of the various cancers is a difficult problem.

Where Should We Go from Here?

In my view the principal problem is that we just do not understand the causes of most cancers. We don’t even know if the problem is genetic or epigenetic or something totally unknown. In theory, problems 2 through 6 in table 6 are all correctable with political and scientific will and more knowledge. Even though we know cancer of the lung is caused by cigarette smoking, we do not know the mechanism, and (except for surgery) we do not know how to meaningfully intervene (see table 2). The pharmaceutical industry cannot make real progress until we understand the mechanisms and molecular causes of cancer so that industrial, academic, and governmental scientists have rational targets for intervention. We will make no progress if there are five hundred or more genetic abnormalities in a single cancer cell. Where would one begin?

What Should We Do Now?

We can still do a lot even today (see table 7). Smoking and hormone replacement therapy are a cause of lung and breast cancer, respectively, and should be stopped or minimized. For hepatitis B (which causes over 50 percent of liver cancer) (Chang et al. 2009) and papilloma virus (which causes almost all cervical cancer and some anal and mouth cancers), we can vaccinate with vaccines that are essentially 100 percent effective. Helicobacter (the probable cause of some stomach cancer) can be easily eliminated with antibiotics. Prophylactic finasteride and tamoxifen (both generic) can decrease prostate and breast cancer, respectively (in high risk patients). We must also decrease alcohol intake (liver and esophageal cancer) and obesity. Obesity is associated with increased cancer risk but the mechanism, if causal, is obscure (Dobson 2009).

We can screen for cervical, colorectal, and breast cancer, although the value of breast cancer screening is not clear (due to overdiagnosis), as I discussed above (Singer 2009). How­ever, in my view, the benefit of breast cancer screening slightly outweighs the harm. For example, if DCIS treatment could be rationalized and provided only to those who need it, breast cancer screening would then be unarguably useful. All attempts to screen for lung cancer, even in smokers, have so far been futile (Infante et al. 2009).

If all these recommendations were followed, we could cut cancer deaths in half. Moreover, with better mechanistic understanding of cancer, we could make truly “smart” drugs, as has been done in recent years for atherosclerosis (heart attacks), hypertension (strokes), gastrointestinal diseases (ulcers), and AIDS—with truly remarkable results. Let us hope cancer is next.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Michiko Spector for her help in preparation of this manuscript and Dr. June Spector for her critical reading of the manuscript.

Tables / Figures

References

• American Cancer Society. 2009. Cancer Facts and Figures 2009. p.1–38.
• Andriole, G.L., R.L. Grubb III, S.S. Buys, et al. 2009. Mortality results from a randomized prostate-cancer screening trial. New England Journal of Medicine 360: 1310–1319.
• Brawley, O.W. 2009. Prostate cancer screening: Is this a teachable moment? Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1295–1297.
• Chang, M-H, S-L You, and C-J Chen, et al. 2009. Decreased incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma in hepatitis B vaccinees: A 20-year follow-up study. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1348–1355.
• Dobson, R. 2009. Obesity is risk factor in 70,000 European cases of cancer a year. British Medical Journal 39: 316.
• Downing, J.R. 2009. Cancer genomes—continuing progress. New England Journal of Medicine 361: 1111–1112.
• Esserman, L., Y. Shieh, and I. Thompson. 2009. Rethinking screening for breast and prostate cancer. Journal of the American Medical Association 302: 1685–1692.
• Evans, A., E. Cornford, and J. James. 2009. Overdiagnosis of breast cancer. British Medical Journal 339: b3256.
• Fojo, T., and C. Grady. 2009. How much is life worth: Cetuximab, non-small cell lung cancer, and the $440 billion question. Journal of the National Cancer Institute 101: 1044–1048.
• Health Agencies Update. 2009. Journal of the American Medical Association 302: 838.
• Infante, M., S. Cavuto, F.R. Lutman, et al. 2009. A randomized study of lung cancer screening with spiral computed tomography. American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicene 180: 445–453.
• Keim, B. 2008. Wired.com, February 28.
• Kolata, G. 2009a. In long drive to cure cancer, advances have been elusive. The New York Times, April 24.
• ———. 2009b. Playing it safe in cancer research. The New York Times, June 28.
• ———. 2009c. Lack of study volunteers is said to hobble fight against cancer. The New York Times, August 3.
• Nathan, D.G. 2007. The Cancer Treatment Revolution. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
• Olson, P., and D. Hanahan. 2009. Breaching the cancer fortress. Science 324: 1400–1401.
• Physicians Desk Reference. 2009. Montvale, NJ: Thomson Reuters.
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• Schröder, F.H., J. Hugosson, M.J. Roobol, et al. 2009. Screening and prostate-cancer mortality in a randomized European study. New England Journal of Medicine 360: 1320–1328.
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Boylan explains:

The Cabal within NASA know that there is a colony of Star Visitors living within Cabeus A Crater. The Cabal’s secret objective is to use the LCROSS and attached rocket stage to obliterate the Star Visitor settlement residing within that crater.... I note that the Cabal is indeed engaged in unlawful war crimes and attempting to position the United States, and by extension, all Earth nations, in an act of war against star civilizations. Since this is not a true act of the United States Government but a rogue act by Cabal infiltrators within NASA, then the official government of the United States, and by extension the United Nations, would repudiate this action as unlawful once its true intent becomes known.

To try to head off this disaster, Boylan attempted to send a message through unspecified special channels to warn President Obama and Vice President Biden, “who normally oversees the government’s Star Visitors programs.” Unfortunately, the message did not get through because it was intercepted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is a “Cabal asset.” So Boylan sent a telepathic message to Star Nations High Council, asking if they would like him to organize a “Joint Psychic Exercise [JPE] to redirect LCROSS and Centaur rocket away from the Moon.” Receiving a reply in the affirmative, Boylan announced the following: “Twenty days from now we will engage (along with Star Nations) in a Joint Psychic Exercise to divert the LCROSS space probe and accompanying Centaur rocket away from crashing into the Star Visitors lunar colony within Cabeus A Crater. That Joint Psychic Exercise will take place simultaneously globally on October 8 (the day before supposed impact).”

Boylan called this the “Joint Psychic Exercise to deflect and disintegrate LCROSS space probe and its Centaur booster rocket” and gave the hour in each time zone for his followers to perform their feats of psychic action-at-a-distance.

However, a week before the launch, NASA changed its mind about which crater to impact. NASA scientists decided that the main crater, Cabeas, was more likely to contain significant amounts of water, and they directed LCROSS and its Centaur rocket to the new target. So the energy from the future Joint Psychic Exercise probably went back in time, causing NASA to direct its impact away from the Star Nations visitors. Or else Boylan’s urgent message finally got through to Star-Visitor-Overseer Joe Biden, who averted an interplanetary war by moving the LCROSS target. But Boylan himself seems unaware of the re-targeting or at least did not mention it on his Web site.

Precisely at the predicted time, the Centaur rocket, followed quickly by LCROSS itself, both undeflected and undisintegrated, slammed into the lunar crater Cabeas at a speed of about 40 km/s. Nonetheless, Boylan proclaimed the exercise a success, claiming that the probe and rocket were “deflected” from the Moon and “disintegrated in space.” Boylan explained how he projected himself astrally through time and space and (still apparently unaware of the probes’ retargeting) “went out psychically to LCROSS and Centaur booster as they were streaming towards the Moon. Next I enwrapped LCROSS in a telekinetic force and redirected it onto a course to the left so it was aiming towards one Moon-diameter’s width left of the Moon’s left side. Then the same was done with the Centaur booster rocket.” But merely to deflect the objects was not enough:

I engaged first one, then the other, with strong dissolution energy to unbind the Strong Force bonds holding their atoms together as molecules. [That, however, is an electromagnetic bond, not a nuclear one.] Moving from top to bottom, I un-did the Strong Force bonds, causing the component materials of these space vehicles to come apart at the molecular level. This process also safely dismantled the advanced munitions which were secretly aboard these space vehicles... . This was confirmed this morning by Star Nations, whose members were also at work on these two space vehicles during our JPE, to assure thorough deflection and disintegration. Thus the star folks lunar colony within Cabeus A Crater is safe from overhead bombardment.

Perhaps this explains why no ground-based telescopes observed any dust ejected from the collision.

Attack of the Drones? Starting in 2007, pictures of weird, spindly shaped UFOs started to turn up in UFO Web sites and magazines, usually submitted anonymously. Looking like a cross between a wire basket and a ceiling fan, “drone UFOs” started popping up all over the place.

The first such photos supposedly came from a fellow in Bakersfield, California, known only as “Chad.” In May of 2007, he submitted a total of six drone UFO photos to the Coast-to-Coast AM Web site, which posted them. He wrote, “My wife and I were on a walk when we noticed a very large, very strange ‘craft’ in the sky.... The craft is almost completely silent and moves very quickly.... I see this thing very often.... It is almost totally silent but not quite. It makes kind of ‘crackling’ noises.... It moves almost like an insect.” The object in the photo had five protruding arms, one much longer than the others.

Before long, a second set of drone UFO photos was allegedly taken at Lake Tahoe near the Nevada-California line, submitted anonymously to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and posted on their Web site. This craft had four arms, two significantly longer than the others. Soon six more anonymous drone photos from Capitola, California, were posted on the Internet by a person calling himself “Rajman.” This one had some sort of “alien writing” on it. A few days later, somebody known only as “Stephen” produced three drone photographs supposedly taken at Big Basin Park, not far from Capitola. The object is somewhat distant, and details are hard to see. About ten days later, a guy named “Ty” submitted twelve drone photos, supposedly taken at Big Basin Park the same day as Stephen’s and seen by his cycling group. Ty’s photos are amazingly close-up, allowing one to see every gear, sprocket, and spike in clear detail. After that, a few more pictures trickled in from here and there, but the fad for photographing drone UFOs seemed to have run its course. Somebody calling himself “Isaac” wrote a letter explaining how he used to work on a classified project called “Caret” that utilized captured alien technology to produce antigravity. He also produced what he purports is a technical manual, portions of it heavily redacted, showing parts that seem to have come from a drone UFO.

In 2008, a woman in London who said she was with the “Open Minds Forum” contacted California private investigator T.K. Davis. She wanted to hire him to find out who photographed the drones, as thus far every photographer has only given a first name. She didn’t want to be identified, either. She had emailed Rajman with some questions, but he closed his e-mail account after only a brief reply. So Davis and his colleague Frankie Dixon headed to Capitola to identify the specific telephone pole seen in the photo. The whole affair is starting to sound like a Humphrey Bogart movie.

On September 10, 2009, the Telegraph of London published a strange photo with a story titled “UFO or Pterodactyl over Argentinian Lake? A Strange Object Photographed over a Lake in Argentina Has Been Described as Either a Flying Saucer or a Flying Dinosaur.” The somewhat blurry photo, taken with a cell phone, shows a round object with five arms or spikes protruding from it, causing anyone who has been watching the carnival described above to immediately exclaim, “It’s a drone!” The photo was taken by Rafael Pino (at least this man has a first and last name!) who says he was driving his truck when he spotted the object and stopped to snap three photos. However, one alert reader in Argentina wrote, “It does look like a windshield cracked by a rock.” An analysis of these photos on the blog Forgetomori (http://forgetomori.com) suggests that “indeed, the ‘UFO’ is apparently in the same perspective in all photos, as if it didn’t really move. Note that in the second photo, the line of horizon is tilted ... but the UFO’s rightmost ‘spike,’ which is actually a crack, is still parallel to it. So, a cracked windshield looks like a good and obvious explanation.” By the way, there’s a lot of interesting investigative material on Forgetomori, whose motto is “Extraordinary Claims, Ordinary Investigations.” But many of the investigations seem well beyond the “ordinary,” so I suggest you have a look.

Yet another photo of a spiky drone from the Netherlands was quickly identified by several readers as a “Waldorf box kite,” which indeed does have the same spiky shape. Of course, the clear and detailed, but anonymous, drone photos from California are not the result of cracked windshields or kites but probably are courtesy of Photoshop or similar software. In fact, some computer graphics whizzes have already produced impressive animated videos of drone UFOs. For one fine example, see the admittedly hoaxed video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBEYc5OUUtw. Seeing is no longer believing, if indeed it ever was.

Richard H. Hall, a UFOlogist of long standing, passed from the scene after succumbing to cancer on July 17 at the age of seventy-eight. Hall served in the U.S. Air Force and attended Tulane University before taking a job with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, DC, in 1958. At that time, NICAP was the largest and most influential UFO group in the U.S. Hall eventually became NICAP’s assistant director, working under NICAP Director Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe (1897–1988), one of the founding fathers of contemporary UFOlogy, whose sensationalist magazine articles and books, such as Flying Saucers from Outer Space, helped create the public’s belief in alien visitors.

Hall is best known as the author of The UFO Evidence (1964), a compendium of carefully selected best cases in the NICAP files. Upon publication, the book was sent to every member of Congress in hopes of attracting interest in the UFO mystery. When Keyhoe was ousted from NICAP in 1969, Hall followed, leaving full-time UFOlogy to take jobs as a technical writer and editor. He remained active with other UFO groups such as MUFON and the Fund for UFO Research. He also wrote numerous published articles on other subjects, especially Civil War history.

Dick, as he was always known, was a strong supporter of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis for UFOs and had a reputation for contentiousness. He was often feuding not only with skeptics but with many UFO believers. The few times I met him, Dick was polite but clearly had a very low tolerance for UFO skepticism. Like so many in the UFO field, he believed that the evidence was “out there” for anyone to see if only they would open their eyes. That his UFO Evidence falls far short of the requirements of science was something Dick Hall was unable to understand.

I made my first investigative pilgrimage to Belgium in 1998 (accompanied by local skeptic Tim Trachet). I returned in 2006 (with Dutch science writer and translator Jan Willem Nienhuys) as a side excursion from travels in the Netherlands (Nickell 2007a). On both occasions, I looked at purported wonders such as the healing shrine known as the Belgian Lourdes, an ancient miracle statue, and a vial of the Holy Blood of Christ.

The Belgian Lourdes

I have twice visited the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes (named after the famous healing-spring grotto in the French Pyrenees) at Oostakker, Belgium. The shrine’s most celebrated miracle is the healing of a laborer named Pierre De Rudder, whose lower left leg was broken by a felled tree in 1867. Reportedly, De Rudder refused amputation and for eight years suffered constant pain from his open and festering wound. Then in April 1875, he visited the Oostakker shrine where, allegedly, he was instantaneously healed, after which he “walked normally until his death in 1898” at age seventy-six (Neiman 1995, 100–101). On July 25, 1908, the Holy See of Bruges declared the healing supernatural.

Over time, a number of legends grew up about the case, including a claim that De Rudder had been treated by professor Thiriar, physician to King Léopold II (a claim dropped by the miraculists after a denial by Thiriar himself). More significantly, it was claimed that prior to 1875 De Rudder’s unmended leg could be twisted at the fracture point to the extent of revolving the foot half a turn (i.e., putting the heel in front). Then, when De Rudder was allegedly cured in 1875, the mending was “instantaneous.” Unfortunately, most of the important testimony in the case went unrecorded for eighteen years, and memories of this age are subject to error (Delcour 1987).

For example, Dr. Van Hoestenberghe claimed that he had performed the twisting movement on De Rudder’s leg, when in fact the physician’s recollection was a false memory. A letter he had written on May 12, 1875 (which had become lost by the time of a canonical inquiry in 1893 but was rediscovered by 1957) revealed that he had not performed the twist, nor even seen it, but had only heard persons talk about it.

Moreover, the twist was apparently not demonstrated at the point of the fracture by showing the naked leg. Instead, it was done with the leg clothed, so the observers could not know where the twist actually occurred. This is a crucial point because certain supple persons can turn their feet almost completely around, like De Rudder, without benefit of any abnormal mobility.1 Although some claimed the leg was uncovered when they saw De Rudder twist it, two men who were present for his demonstrations “well over a hundred times” stated the leg was never naked on those occasions (Delcour 1987). De Rudder’s eagerness to demonstrate the effect at every opportunity suggests not a suffering man happy to suffer more but someone performing a stunt with a purpose—one that will soon become clear.

As to the supposed instantaneous nature of the healing, that claim depends on the dubious testimony of just three persons: an illiterate woman who was apparently represented by hearsay and a father and son who seemed eager to help certify a miracle. (Their story even improved over the years.)

In contrast is the evidence that De Rudder had actually undergone “a certain improvement” about fourteen months after the accident. We know that the Viscount who employed De Rudder at the time of the accident gave the invalid worker a pension, characterized as a “nice salary.” It was rumored about the village that De Rudder was malingering in order to effect a life of ease.

After the Viscount died on July 26, 1874, his heir stopped the pension, whereupon De Rudder’s wife and daughter had to begin working. Some eight months later, De Rudder may have hit on a clever plan that would allow him to abruptly end his pretended disability so he could, necessarily, return to work: he went to Oostakker and claimed a miraculous cure. However, he returned home with a scar that, reported by Dr. Van Hoestenberghe, was “such as one finds a long time after a healing” (qtd. in Delcour 1987).

Other medical evidence likewise supports the view that De Rudder’s healing was less than miraculous. A broken leg such as he suffered could—with immobility and good hygiene—have healed without amputation. Besides, the bones (see figure 1) grew together obliquely in a fashion a surgeon would not have been proud of. Also, that which would have indeed been beyond nature—the reconstitution of De Rudder’s dead tendon—did not occur (De Meester 1957, 106). One touted proof that the cure was instantaneous comes from the absence of thickening of the bone callus at the mending site, but this thickening could have been reabsorbed by the body in several months or a few years ( Encyclopedia Britannica 2009, s.v. “callus”). Adrien Delcour (1987) concludes that the physicians who consider the De Rudder case miraculous almost unanimously do so on the basis that the cure was instantaneous, and that, as we have seen, is dependent on dubious testimony. Indeed, there is evidence to the contrary.

The De Rudder case gives one pause regarding other claims of miraculous healing at Oostakker, Lourdes, and elsewhere. Such certifications are often vague and unscientific. Miracle is not a scientific concept, and miracle claims are typically only those found to be “medically inexplicable.” Thus, claimants are engaging in a logical fallacy called “arguing from ignorance”—that is, drawing a conclusion based on a lack of knowledge (Nickell 2007, 202–205). The De Rudder case is even worse, since there is evidence that an injury, healed long before, was passed off as instantaneous—a miracle that wasn’t.

Miracle Statue

Figure 2. The little statue of the Virgin at Belgium's most-frequented pilgrimage site is said to be miraculous despite being a replacement.

Belgium’s most frequented pilgrimage site is Scherpenheuvel (Dutch for “sharp hill”) in the north-central part of the country. There, in the Middle Ages, stood a great, solitary oak that was visible from all around. The spot was a center of superstitious practices and pagan worship until, in the fourteenth century, a small wooden figure of the Virgin Mary was affixed to the tree, and the makeshift shrine began to gain fame. In time, miracles began to be attributed to the little statue (see figure 2).

The first reputed miracle occurred in 1514 when, according to a pious little legend, a shepherd or shepherd boy discovered the figurine lying on the ground and intended to take it home. However, the Virgin Mary miraculously transfixed him—froze him in place—preventing the statue’s removal. Subsequently, the shrine became more widely known.

In 1602, a little wooden chapel was built at the site, and the following year a new miracle was reported: the statue wept bloody tears, reportedly in protest over the religious schism then plaguing the Low Countries.

Still another miracle was said to have occurred in 1604 when troops of the Archduke Albert (the Spanish-appointed governor of the Low Countries) routed the Protestants and retook Ostend. Albert and his wife, the Archduchess Isabella, determined to thank God by commissioning the erection of a monumental baroque basilica at the site, inaugurated in 1627. Albert died in the meantime, but Isabella walked to the inauguration, giving rise to pilgrimages that have continued ever since, supplicants seeking their own miracles in the form of healings and other blessings ( Scherpenheuvel n.d.; Scherpenheuvel-Zichem n.d.; “Scherpenheuvel-Zichem” 2009).

What are we to make of the alleged miracles of Scherpenheuvel? First, we should remember that the site was considered magical before it was taken over by Catholic Christians, part of a common process known as syncretism in which one religion is grafted onto another. (For example, Catholic conquistadors in Mexico erected a shrine to the Virgin Mary on a hill where the Aztecs had a temple to their virgin goddess Tonantzin [Mullen 1998, 6; Smith 1983, 20; Nickell 1993, 29–34; Nickell 2004, 51–55].) In short, one may ask, are the alleged miracles of Scherpenheuvel attributable to the statue of the Virgin and the power of the Virgin herself or to pagan deities? Or might there have been no miracles at all?

The story of the transfixed shepherd boy is one of those vague, pious folktales lacking any evidence to support it. If we are prepared to believe a shepherd boy considered taking the statue, we can also believe it was only an attack of conscience that stayed his hand, and the rest of the tale is attributable to exaggeration.

As to the statue’s bloody tears, that figurine was not the same one that had transfixed the shepherd boy. The original had been stolen in 1580 when the region was pillaged by Dutch Protestant iconoclasts (those hostile to the worship of images). In other words, the statue that legendarily saved itself from a shepherd’s grasp was unable to stave off marauding anti-idolaters, suggesting at best its powers were limited.

Thus the bloody tears were produced by a replacement statue, and in any case, the phenomenon—judging from numerous modern examples—was likely a pious fraud. In 1985, for instance, a statue of the virgin that wept and bled in the home of a Quebec railroad worker proved on examination to have an applied mixture of blood and animal fat. When the room warmed from the body heat of the pilgrims, the substance liquefied and trickled realistically. In another case in Sardinia, Italy, in 1995, DNA tests on the blood revealed that it belonged to the statue’s owner (Nickell 2007b, 227–228). (Her attorney explained, “Well, the Virgin Mary had to get that blood from somewhere.”)

The 1604 military victory at Ostend does not seem so miraculous if one adopts the perspective of the Protestants or if one wonders why we should think statues miraculous when desirable things happen (a statue’s theft is prevented, a battle won) but not unmiraculous when bad things occur (a statue is stolen, marauders overrun the land).

Given the image of the Virgin Mary as healer and protectress (Mullen 1998, 10), it is not surprising that desperate people still seek miracles at Scherpenheuvel, where I have witnessed the votive candles, the fervent prayers, the posted notes beseeching “Moeder Maria” for supernatural assistance. Such help may seem to come to those who count only the good luck; otherwise they discount the bad or even—sad to say—blame themselves for not praying hard enough.

The Holy Blood

John Calvin (1543, 226) critically observed that alleged blood of Jesus “is exhibited in more than a hundred places,” one of the most celebrated being the Basilica of the Holy Blood in Bruges. I twice visited the site, and on the second occasion (October 25, 2006) I was able to hold in my hands the reliquary supposedly containing the very blood of Christ (figure 3). It has been called “Europe’s holiest relic” (Coupe 2009, 132).

According to legend, the Bruges relic was obtained in Palestine in the mid-twelfth century, during the Second Crusade, by Thierry of Alsace. He allegedly received it from his relative Baldwin II, then King of Jerusalem, as a reward for meritorious service. However, chronicles of the crusades fail to mention the relic being present in Jerusalem (Aspeslag 1988, 10). Sources claim that Thierry, Count of Flanders, brought the relic to Bruges in 1150, while another source reports it arrived in 1204. In any event, the earliest document that refers to it dates from 1270 (Catholic Encyclopedia 1913, s.v. “Bruges”; Aspeslag 1988, 9–11).

The reliquary, housed in the twelfth-century Basilica of the Holy Blood, is now brought out daily for veneration by the faithful. Although mistakenly characterized by at least one source as “a fragment of cloth stained with what is said to be the blood of Christ” (McDonald 2009, 145), it in fact consists of “clotted blood” contained in a vial set in a glass-fronted cylinder, each end of which is covered with gold coronets decorated with angels. The vial (made of rock crystal rather than glass) has been determined to be an eleventh-or twelfth-century Byzantine perfume bottle.

In 1310 Pope Clement V issued a papal bull granting indulgences to pilgrims who visited the chapel at Bruges and venerated the blood. At that time, believers claimed the blood miraculously returned to its original liquid state every Friday at noon. This not only sounds like a magic trick, but it evokes the similar “miracle” of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples—a phenomenon that forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I replicated, utilizing a mixture of olive oil, melted beeswax, and red pigment. In addition to St. Januarius, some twenty other saints have reportedly yielded magically liquefying blood. My Italian colleague, chemist Luigi Garlaschelli, externally examined one of these in its sealed vial and discovered that the “blood” simply liquefied whenever the temperature rose (Nickell 2007c, 44–49, 169–170).

Unfortunately, the Holy Blood at Bruges soon stopped liquefying, supposedly as the result of some blasphemy that occurred later in 1310. The miracle recurred only one more time, in 1388 (Aspeslag 1988, 11).

Naturally, I wanted to get a good look at the “blood,” so I twice stood in the pilgrims’ line, supposedly to pray over the reliquary (again, see figure 3). In fact, although I bowed respectfully, I used the two brief occasions to scrutinize the substance. I observed that it had a waxen look and was bespeckled with “coagulated drops” that have suspiciously remained red (Bruges 1998, 28) unlike real blood, which blackens with age (Kirk 1974, 194–195).

In brief, the Holy Blood of Bruges lacks a credible provenance, since it has no record for a dozen centuries after the death of Jesus and is contained in a medieval bottle. It appeared with a profusion of other dubious blood relics, including several with which it had in common the property of liquefying and resolidifying, suggestive of a magic trick. Both that behavior and its current appearance are incompatible with genuine old blood and are instead indicative of a pious fraud.

Note

1. States Adrien Delcour (1987): “At the price of slight hip dislocation certain rather supple persons (the author of the present lines, for example) can manage without effort to turn their foot around, with the great toe almost to the back by rotation [of] the ankle. This exercise should have been easier for De Rudder because he had lost the extender tendon of the big toe.”

References

• Aspeslag, Pierre. 1988. Chapel of the Holy Blood, Bruges. Ostend, Belgium: s.v. Van Mieghem A.
• Bruges Tourist Guide. 1998. Brussels, Belgium: Editions THILL S.A.
• Calvin, John. 1543. Treatise on Relics, trans. Count Valerian Krasinski 1854; 2nd ed. Edinburgh: John Stone, Hunter, and Col., 1870, 217–218. (Reprinted without translator’s notes but with an introduction by Joe Nickell, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2009.)
• Catholic Encyclopedia. 1913. New York: Encyclopedia Press.
• Coupe, Alison, ed. 2009. Michelin Belgium Luxembourg (travel guide). Watford, Herts, England: Michelin Apa Publications.
• Delcour, Adrien. 1987. A great ‘Lourdes miracle’: the cure of Pierre de Rudder or, what is the value of testimony? A paper by Delcour of Brussels, Belgium, translated by Jan Willem Nienhaus.
• De Meester, Canon A. 1957. Report of the Holy See of Bruges; cited in Delcour 1987.
• Kirk, Paul L. 1974. Crime Investigation, 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
• McDonald, George. 2009. Frommer’s Belgium, Holland & Luxembourg, 11th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
• Mullen, Peter. 1998. Shrines of Our Lady. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Nieman, Carol. 1995. Miracles: The Extraordinary, the Impossible and the Divine. New York: Viking Studio Books.
• Nickell, Joe. 1993. Looking for a Miracle. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• —. 2004. The Mystery Chronicles: More Real-Life X-Files. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
• —. 2007a. The Netherlands: Visions and revisions. Skeptical Inquirer 31:6(Nov./Dec.), 16–19.
• —. 2007b. Adventures in Paranormal Investigation. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
• —. 2007c. Relics of the Christ. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky.
• Notre Dame de Lourdes a Oostakker. 1975. Souvenir booklet in French (“Imprimature Gradae, 7–4–1975, O. Schelfhout, vic. Gen.”), distributed at the shrine.
• Scherpenheuvel: Famous Shrine of Our Lady. N.d. Pilgrimage information sheet in English, provided at the basilica.
• Scherpenheuvel-Zichem. N.d. Large color folder with text in four languages. Brabant, Belgium: Hageland.
• Scherpenheuvel-Zichem. 2009. Available online at http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/Scherpenheuvel-Zichem (accessed August 4, 2009).
• Smith, Jody Brant. 1983. The Image of Guadalupe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• World Desk Reference, 3rd ed. 2000. New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing.

Darwin (played by Paul Bettany) struggles to write his books as he battles poor health, internal and external pressures, and personal demons, especially regarding his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and his brightest daughter, Annie (Martha West). In one of the most moving and impassioned scenes, we see Darwin's furor after Annie is punished in Sunday school for questioning her vicar and asking about dinosaurs. Darwin's outrage is palpable as he prepares to confront the priest about punishing his daughter for simply speaking a self-evident scientific truth--not blasphemous impertinence.  

Charles Darwin was clearly a man as enamored with his family as with his study of the world around him. Charles explains the naturalistic world to his children: how a camera works, how the geological strata of rocks tells a story of what happened millions of years ago, and so on. Several fanciful segments appear, essentially miniature documentaries depicting nature's life cycles. Rarely has a film so effectively conveyed a wonderful, humanistic sense of the magic and awe of science. 

When Annie dies, Charles is devastated and struggles to find the faith in himself to complete his book. While Emma takes solace in the idea that their beloved daughter is in heaven with God, Charles can't bring himself to share her comforting belief. Nor is he willing to accept the insulting and feeble “comfort” that Annie's death is part of some greater divine plan; he has studied nature's cruelties and is too much a scientist to pretend that his family is exempt from them.  

While Charles struggles with personal demons, the rest of the world waits for the product of his work. In one pivotal scene, Thomas Huxley (a piss-and-vinegar brimming Toby Jones) confronts Darwin, urging him to complete his long-gestating book. When Darwin says he needs more time and more evidence, Huxley barks: “Mr. Darwin, either you are being disingenuous, or you do not fully understand your own theory. Evidently what is true of the barnacle is true of all creatures--even humans. Clearly the Almighty can no longer claim to have authored all species in under a week. You've killed God, sir. You've killed God.”

Never before has the threat of Darwin's ideas to creationism been so clearly depicted in a mainstream movie. While other films have downplayed or glossed over the friction between On the Origin of Species and the Bible, Creation tackles it head-on. Stephen Jay Gould's conciliatory notion of the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion is out the window; here we have the bare-knuckled, Richard Dawkins view.

Creation's most remarkable achievement is to humanize one of the most important and influential scientists in history. It's no secret that most scientists in films are depicted in an unflattering light. Horror films often depict scientists as Dr. Frankenstein-like evil geniuses whose experiments bring death and destruction. Comedies show scientists as socially inept nerds obsessed with numbers and data crunching. In the wake of the recent “Climategate controversy,” climate scientists were portrayed as deceitful and conspiratorial hoaxers trying to mislead the public about global warming. Rare indeed are films that show scientists as real humans with problems and struggles who do their best to reveal scientific truths. (A few of the best are Contact, The Dish, and A Beautiful Mind.) 

Creation premiered on the opening night of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival in September. At the time, Creation producer Jeremy Thomas lamented the fact that the film had not yet found a distributor in the United States. Creation was eventually picked up by Newmarket Films--ironically perhaps best known for releasing Mel Gibson's controversial 2004 religious gorefest The Passion of the Christ.  

The performances in Creation are as remarkable as the script. Paul Bettany evokes Charles Darwin with seeming effortless ease, and truly inhabits the role. His Darwin is deeply conflicted, afraid of how his ideas may hurt those he loves, and wracked with guilt that he may have contributed to Annie's death. Jennifer Connelly is wonderful as Emma, depicting not only her strength and devotion to Charles, but her own conflicted devotion to her faith and her husband's work.

The film was directed by Jon Amiel, from a screenplay written by John Collee, which in turn evolved from the biography Annie's Box, written by one of Darwin's great-great grandsons. Though Creation has been well received, some early reviewers groused that the film is boring; perhaps they were expecting the story of the theory of evolution would be told amidst action-packed swashbuckling and explosions. Creation is beautiful and powerful, with great performances and important ideas about faith, love, loss and truth.

LOS ANGELES, October 24—A study was published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine claiming that prayers from the USA, Canada, and Australia caused a 100% increase in pregnancy rates among infertility patients in Korea. The surprising results announced by Kwang Cha and associates were widely reported in the news media, including on the ABC news program Good Morning America. However, the study’s credibility was undermined when one of the co-authors, Daniel Wirth, was arrested by the FBI and later pled guilty to fraud. Cha’s other co-author, Columbia University’s Rogerio Lobo, later revealed that he had not participated in the research and withdrew his name from the published findings. Even with one of his co-authors in federal prison and the other disgraced, Korean fertility specialist Kwang Yul Cha stood by the allegedly supernatural study. He eventually filed a defamation lawsuit against Bruce Flamm, a California physician who had published several articles questioning the validity of the Cha/Wirth “pregnancy by prayer” report. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court in August 2007, was thrown out of court in April 2008. However, in June 2008 Cha took the case to the California Appellate Court. Today the Court of Appeals “affirmed in full” the Superior Court decision and thus ruled that Superior Court Judge James Dunn had acted appropriately in tossing out the lawsuit.

In response to the ruling, Dr. Flamm issued the following statement: “Today’s ruling is a victory for science and evidence-based medicine. Scientists must be allowed to question bizarre claims. Cha’s mysterious study was designed and allegedly conducted by a man who turned out to be a criminal with a 20-year history of fraud. A criminal who steals the identities of dead children to obtain bank loans and passports is not a trustworthy source of research data. Cha could have simply admitted this obvious fact but instead he hired a team of lawyers to punish me for voicing my opinions. Physicians should debate their opinions in medical journals, not in courts of law. Judges have better things to do with their time and taxpayers have better things to do with their money.”

Dr. Flamm is a physician with Kaiser Permanente and a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of California. He has been the senior investigator on numerous medical studies and has written several books and book chapters.

For more information contact: Janice Goings: 951-288-0937 jangoings@aol.com