It’s not looking good for the authors of a study that evaluated the efficacy of prayer. The authors were Rogerio A. Lobo, Daniel P. Wirth, and Kwang Y. Cha, and now look at what has happened to them (link may not work if you don’t have a subscription to the CHE).
Doctors were flummoxed in 2001, when Columbia University researchers published a study in The Journal of Reproductive Medicine that found that strangers’ prayers could double the chances that a woman would get pregnant using in-vitro fertilization. In the years that followed, however, the lead author removed his name from the paper, saying that he had not contributed to the study, and a second author went to jail on unrelated fraud charges.
Meanwhile, many scientists and doctors have written to the journal criticizing the study, and at least one doctor has published papers debunking its findings.
Now the third author of the controversial paper, Kwang Y. Cha, has been accused of plagiarizing a paper published in the journal Fertility and Sterility in December 2005. Alan DeCherney, editor of Fertility and Sterility and director of the reproductive biology and medicine branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said on Monday that it was clear to him that Dr. Cha, who has since left Columbia, plagiarized the work of a South Korean doctoral student for a paper he published on detecting women who are at risk of premature menopause.
Isn’t the explanation obvious? God really hates scientists who poke at him.
Third party distant prayer = baloney.
You will never ever ever see a mainstream program present this trivial and obvious fact to the public without a preacher nearby to whisper reassuring words into the sheeple’s ears.
That is why America elected George W. Bush twice and that is why America sucks.
You may recall that Elisabeth Targ, who ran an earlier fraudulent study into the possibility of healing glioblastoma multiforme, a rare form of brain tumor, with prayer, died of glioblastoma multiforme.
I’m waiting for the study that says which combinations of prayers are most effective for which diseases. I’m surprised they haven’t written that one yet.
Looks like they have far too much trouble though, just writing *A* paper without plagiarizing somebody. Maybe they’re dilluting their good intentions toward the sick with their back-handed and dishonest attempts at science…
What if the study had been valid and replicable, and we discovered that prayer routinely does work when used to help infertile couples conceive through in vitro fertilization?
Well, assuming that God was involved — and not some strange psychokenesis or Power of Positive Thinking energy magic — the experiment would have managed to both test and disprove the hypothesis that the Catholic Church is the One True Church, since my understanding is that the Catholic Church is officially against in vitro fertilization. They say God told them it was against His will. Guess not. So much for the absolute divide between science and religion.
Does anyone know of a study in which the career paths of scientists who have been found guilty of fraud, plagiarism, or simply gross incompetence have been traced? Also of interest would be similar findings with reference to religious figures.
Re Mothra
I believe that there was a book written about the David Baltimore scandal relative to one of his assistants who dry labbed some of her experiments.
If you want to see “sophisticated” Andrew Sullivan/Ken Miller/Jim Wallis-type Christians tie themselves in knots (and who doesn’t?), ask them to justify petitionary prayer.
As far as I can tell, the story is that they’re only asking God to do what he would do anyway (“Lord, if it is your will, heal my sister”), but the act of petitioning God to do something he would do anyway is somehow ennobling. Or something.
NB Were anyone seriously to look into such a “curse”, there are other prayer studies to provide data points. It might be that bad things only happens to the people who lie or cheat on their results, rather than merely for conducting any sort of prayer study at all (ie the supposed poking at god offence). Links:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1072638.ece
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/4681771.stm
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/5950.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000082&sid=ahO6jjM9tN_U
+ http://www.religioustolerance.org/medical6.htm
What? Fraud in a prayer study?
I’m shocked! Yes, I’m shocked! How could this happen?
Well, assuming that God was involved — and not some strange psychokenesis or Power of Positive Thinking energy magic — the experiment would have managed to both test and disprove the hypothesis that the Catholic Church is the One True Church, since my understanding is that the Catholic Church is officially against in vitro fertilization. They say God told them it was against His will. Guess not. So much for the absolute divide between science and religion.
Um, you’re forgetting that the prayer thing didn’t work. So the divide is still there and the Catholics are still on top. No worries!
From the Elizabeth Targ article:
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She had Moore run the mood state scores. These came out worse – the treatment group was in more psychological stress than the control group.
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I find this interesting, and I think it is because I remember that the heart study had similar findings.
I think the problem is clear: Lobo, Wirth and Cha were not praying hard enough for their study to work.
386sx:
Yes, I know the study was a wash — I was asking a hypothetical. People who keep insisting that spiritual truths are completely outside of science’s ability to study fail to recognize that if we can conceive of an experiment which shows a positive result in measuring a religious claim, then the area can’t really be outside of science’s ability to study, can it? I can’t think of any experiment which would prove that chocolate really does taste better than vanilla, so that vanilla-lovers are wrong to prefer it. But I can imagine this study — or others like it — being controlled, confirmed, and replicated to such a high level of confidence that people who still don’t believe in God would be ignoring the science. And how the theists would crow in vindication!
Religion is not really untestable. It tests negative. So everyone rushes in to protect it by denying it was ever testable in the first place. And then some of them have another try at it. Hope springs eternal.
The “at least one doctor who has published (a) paper debunking (the study’s) findings” mentioned above is probably Dr. Bruce Flamm. I once heard him give a detailed talk on *exactly* what was wrong with the study, and it was a veritiable comedy of errors from the get-go. The real scandal is that the peer-review journal involved apparently still refuses to remove or retract the paper — which was published right after Sept 11, 2001. Presumably, the editors felt America really needed to believe that God really does watch over people and help them sometimes, so they allowed themselves to get sloppy.
Discovering miracles is no great trick. The Catholics have been doing it on order for centuries whenever they want to canonize some Spanish bishop or other. Miracles are reported less often in Prostestant areas, presumably because most Protestant denominations believe that miracles ceased with the close of the Apostolic Age. Of course one could hypothesize that the Roman church gets better results because it is in good with the Holy Spirit, but in the miracle business, as in research on prayer, the butcher’s thumb on the scale is surely a more reliable adjunct than divine intervention.
“if we can conceive of an experiment which shows a positive result in measuring a religious claim, then the area can’t really be outside of science’s ability to study, can it?”
The problem I see with the whole concept of testing the efficacy of prayer is that we can’t control for “God’s mysterious ways.” If such a Being exists, what’s to stop him from skewing the results by intervening selectively according to whether or not the prayers are part of an experiment?
Yes, and the journal also refused to print Flamm’s letters to the editor concerning the paper for several years.
The Columbia University ‘Miracle’ Study: Flawed and Fraud
Such a being could have also interfered with, or expedited your post on this. I suppose it could also have interfered with my post in response to your post. And…
Aiiiiieeeee! (falls into the deep dark well of infinite regress)