"The science of prayer"

Date:
1970
Reference:
PP/CRI/I/2/9
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: "The science of prayer". Source: Wellcome Collection.

    U CAMBRIDGE EVENING NEWS, Thursday. November i HE SCIENCE OF PRAYER It probably gets hormones moving I Francis Crick, the Cambridge molecular biologist and Nobel Prize-winner, suggests that the efficacy of prayer might form a useful field of research in the future. So many people pray that one finds it difficult to believe that they do not get some satisfaction from it, he says, and a good molecular biologist will naturally believe that this can be I expressed, at least in part, in molecular terms. INGENIOUS It would not surprise _ _ nature has evolved rather special and ingenious mechan isms so that evolution can pro ceed at an extretnely rapid raté — recombination is an ob vious example, he says. It may even be that if we could look back from 100 years ahead, we would realise that what we know today is not adequate to explain the rate which actually He does not think that science will ever run short of problems to tackle. There are so many things we should like to know— and like to know about in con siderable detail — that we need not seriously worry at this stage that the subject will become ex hausted. Dr. Crick is convinced that most sciences will have advanced a long way towards broad un derstanding by the year 2000. He adds: My broad conclu sions, then are that between now and the year 2000 biological research* will take place on a massive scale. By then most of the detailed problems in mole cular and cell biology facing us now are likely to be solved. Certain broad but important subjects will still be in a primi tive stage and there will inevit ably be a proportion of novel, unexpected and significant ad vances the nature of which we In short, the f whole field is likely to be even more fascin ating in the year 2000 than it is BY RODNEY TIBBS Andrew McCulloch s today.'- D R CRICK, who was one of the principal opponents of a chapel at Churchill College, at which he is an Honorary Fellow, reflects on prayer as part of an article in the science magazine Nature in which he looks to Molecular Biology in the Year 2,000. He goes on: It is not quite true that nobody has researched into such matters as the efficacy of prayer. In the last century, for example, Galton wrote an amusing paper on thè subject (Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer) in which he showed by a couple of ingenious statistical tests that the efficacy of prayer seemed to be rather This line of work does hot appear to have been followed up either by the Church of England or by the Vatican. Dr. Crick says that, a s far as ■_ .— i.~- cori. search would involve the mole cular biology of the synapse (nerve junctions) and the over all organisation of the nervous system. EFFECT But the principal effect is probably hormonal, and one would not be surprised to find that hormone levels were affec ted by prayer. No doubt, before long, some 'with it' church in America will take up the topic. Dr. Crick's other predictions for science in. the year 2000 in clude the origins of life on earth, the existence of life on other worlds and communication with creatures on other plan ets, assuming they exist. He adds: Although I think a vast amount of progress will be made on the understanding of the nervous system, it would not be surprising to me if some of the more sophisticated aspects of the behaviour of the brain still remained a puzzle. I am thinking of such mat ters as our vivid interior three- dimensional picture óf the world, which we build up from the light signals falling on to our eyes and other information, and also such problems as the nature of consciousness, although whether this will turn out to be a real problem or one remains to be Dr. Crick suggests 39GNS. SPECIAL OFFER!!! TWIN TUB WITH THE SINGLE TUB WASHER & SPINARINSE SAVE A FURTHER t\ OUR PRICE 65 GNS. 2UGNS. PLUS CHRISTMAS SHOPPING