Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Prayer Study Hasn't Got One

What? Another bogus study?

This entry is a shift from my standby controversial topic (stem cells) to another one (religion), but the story is actually the same. Only the names have changed to protect... Actually, I am not changing any of the names.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
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.

Whoa! Jail! Pardon my flippancy, but who's praying now?

Evidently, the study's third (and only remaining) author, Kwang Y. Cha published a separate paper copied from a Korean doctoral student without his permission in an American journal. That's called plagiarism.

On a related note, when will people stop trying to use science to 'prove' faith?

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