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Sheila, a tough-minded New York career newspaperwoman turned magazine writer, prided herself on her cynical view on life and her ability to not be taken in. She got an assignment from her magazine to do a story on Mother Teresa and welcomed the opportunity.

“I thought she was a fraud, a genius at public relations maybe, but I disliked her conservative theology, which I thought demeaned women, and I found her constant involvement with the rich and famous very suspect. I arranged to join her and spent more than a week traveling with her and watching her at one of her hospices. My first impression never changed. I disagreed with almost everything she had to say about religion. I found her views about God depressing, and her vision about the place of women in the church almost medieval. At the same time from the very first moment I was in her presence, I had this overpowering urge to call the magazine and tell them that I wasn’t coming back; that I wanted to give myself to Mother Teresa’s work. It left me confused and ecstatic” (private communication between Stephan A. Schwartz and Sheila, March 23, 1989).

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
May 2009 (Vol. 5, Issue 3, Pages 142-145)

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By the time we get there it is already a raucous party. The elderly Freeland Hall on Whidbey island, off the coast of Seattle, with its walls and ceiling made of short strips of ancient pine boards, vibrates with the noise. Two hundred fifty people have packed themselves in tonight to eat a simple box dinner on folding tables and watch six men make fools of themselves. One of them will be voted Mr South Whidbey. The voting is done by buying votes, in the form of business card–sized bits of paper, for $1 a card. There is much encouragement to buy as many cards as possible.

As I sit there eating my chicken salad, men in odd outfits—one wears a kind of apron upon which is airbrushed a nude female form with a fig leaf, another is got up as Abe Lincoln—circulate with cardboard beer six-pack carriers. Where the beer would be there are paper cups with the names of the contestants, who are also wearing improbable outfits and who range in age from one man in his early 30s wearing a kilt and sporting a chain saw—sort of like one of the Village People seen by someone on a bad drug trip—to an octogenarian dressed as a 1920s Parisian boulevardier.

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
January 2010 (Vol. 6, Issue 1, Pages 15-16)

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After the American Revolution intellectuals, working from drawing rooms on both sides of the Atlantic, thought the colonies would eventually replicate Britain’s power structure based on large land ownership and an entrenched leadership class. There was more land than anyone in Europe had ever seen and, amongst the leadership, Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Madison and a host of other founders lived the country life. Even city rich such as Robert Morris owned and speculated in land. Benjamin Franklin, however, although often involved in land schemes, did not think the British agrarian model—even in its more noble Jeffersonian variant—would prevail. The reason he did not was because his life had been very different from the other founders. They all were country gentry or urban upper middle class professionals. He was a working class “leather apron man” in the slang of his day, was proud of it, and never concealed his roots, no matter the circumstances.

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
November 2009 (Vol. 5, Issue 6, Pages 327-329)

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“After a spell of two days in hospital following what amounts to a heart attack, I returned home and was shortly thereafter sent a document telling me my insurer refused to pay any of the $17,000+ bill.” My friend Daryl (I have changed his name to preserve his privacy), a highly sophisticated and notably brilliant writer, said all this to me in an e-mail when I asked him how he was doing. He went on. “This is larcenous and disgraceful behavior; I’ve been paying ever increasing monthly premiums for years, and it is beyond belief that the insurer should now refuse to meet its responsibilities.” Daryl had come here from another industrialized country where healthcare was considered a right; this was the first time he had asked anything of his insurer, and his disbelief was tinged with deep vexation.

“When my attorney wife called them to protest, she was told cheerfully that this notice had been sent out routinely ‘before the situation has even been assessed’ and hence to ignore it—for the moment. Then I got notified that a crucial medication I have had prescribed for some years was being disallowed even though my specialist wrote the requested authorization for it at the insurance company’s demand.”

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
July 2009 (Vol. 5, Issue 4, Pages 197-199)

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What could be more natural than wanting a healthy beautiful baby? Has there ever been a time in history when parents, even in the midst of disasters and despair, did not wish to be delivered of a healthy child? And who wouldn’t want to have a son or daughter who was as smart as Einstein, as athletic as Michael Jordan, and as attractive as … well, name the person whose looks you find most appealing? What could be more natural?

But this deep-seated drive when linked to the onrushing train of genetic medicine is creating a trend that will shape—both literally and figuratively—the future of our species. You haven’t heard of this? It is not surprising. The linkage and its implications have almost no place at the table of the public conversation. Here are just a few examples of what I mean:

Quietly in a laboratory in Vancouver, Robert Holt, head of sequencing for the University of British Columbia’s Genome Science Centre, is working to create the first made to order life form—what is being called “synthetic life”—a microbe.1 Dr. Holt is part of a project led by Craig Venter, former head of Celera Genomics, the private firm that mapped the human genome in 2000. Dr. Venter makes it clear that he and his team have no intention of stopping with microbes. Putting aside for the moment the profound implications of creating a life form from scratch, I mention this principally because, as Dr. Venter says, “We’re going from reading to writing the genetic code.”1

While Holt and Venter are finding out how to write our genetic code, Drs. Elizabeth Fisher at the Institute of Neurology and Victor Tybulewicz at the National Institute for Medical Research in London have perfected a technique for successfully transplanting human chromosomes into mice. It is a breakthrough holding the promise of transforming medical research into the genetic causes of disease. The mice were genetically engineered to carry a copy of human chromosome 21, a string of about 250 genes. About one in a thousand people are born with an extra copy of this chromosome, which causes Down’s syndrome. These genetic studies will help scientists also discern which genes are responsible for a wide range of medical conditions prevalent among people with Down’s syndrome, including impaired brain development, Alzheimer’s disease, heart defects, leukemia, and behavioral abnormalities.

Many have hailed the work, but critics question whether such research does not push the envelope of genetic manipulation too far, blurring the boundaries that define what it means to be biologically human. And this is but one in a wide range of research efforts.

During just the past two years, researchers have created pigs with human blood, fused rabbit eggs with human DNA, and injected human stem cells to make paralyzed mice walk. Quite apart from the implications this research holds for the human species, this intermingling contains another nightmare scenario that some geneticists and medical ethicists have begun to take seriously. What if, by adding human brain cells, a human mind somehow got trapped inside an animal brain? That the Legend of NIMH came to life.

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
March 2006 (Vol. 2, Issue 2, Pages 106-108)

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I thought I would start this column by focusing on two well-conducted recent surveys, one exploring belief in anomalous perception (AP1)—knowing something you could not know through normally mediated sense perception or from intellectual sources, the other dealing with anomalous perturbation (AP2)—consciousness in some way directly affecting physical reality. Each study confirms that beliefs associated with these two phenomenological cousins, whether belief is framed as psychic, spiritual, or formally religious—be it a traditional Christian, Hindu, deist, or secular metaphor—constitutes a powerful force shaping our world.

The first survey, which polled the general public, was conducted by the Gallup Organization.1 It involved telephone interviews with 1,002 “national adults” (Americans 18 years of age or older). Gallup maintains the conclusions have 95% confidence with a maximum sampling error ± three percentage points. It found the following:

“About three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief,” and that, “the most prevalent belief is extrasensory perception (ESP), at 41%.” Twenty percent believe in reincarnation. Other phenomena that would involve what we are increasingly calling nonlocal mind include:

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
September 2005 (Vol. 1, Issue 5, Pages 338-339)

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ABSTRACT

If you are literate or watch television, you know something about the Chinese miracle. How China is growing to be one of the great economies and powers on the planet. How it will soon be one of the most prosperous and populous nations in the world. If there are any worries, they are usually described in military terms or in the context of economic competition.
What doesn’t often get discussed is that this prosperity, like our own, at least using the economic models we adhere to, comes at a cost. It is destroying the earth.

Like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear one by one in the Bible, a fourth defining trend of the 21st Century is emerging.  Joining global warming, pandemics, and religious strife, we must add the cancer of unconscious growth. Growth that does not factor in the complex living interrelationships that collectively run the earth. The general assumption is that civilizations fail because of outside forces that impact upon them. It is a standard view of history. The destruction of the Mesoamerican civilizations because of the invasion of European conquistadors is one example. The death of European Jewish culture because of the Holocaust inflicted by the Nazis is another. And, without question, such external historical forces are one explanation. But not the only one.

Publication History: Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
January 2006 (Vol. 2, Issue 1, Pages 17-18)