Globules against bioterror

The scientific foundation Wayne B. Jonas directs is funding research into the effects of prayer, the use of homeopathy to fight bioterrorism...

The scientific foundation Wayne B. Jonas directs is funding research into the effects of prayer, the use of homeopathy to fight bioterrorism and whether magnetic devices can heal orthopedic injuries.

8220;We8217;re trying to stimulate good-quality research,8221; said Jonas, a former chief of the Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health who directs the nonprofit Samueli Institute for Information Biology SIIB in Alexandria. 8220;There is a good case for looking at these things scientifically, because we don8217;t know a lot about them.8221;

But, the 51-year-old board-certified family physician and retired Army doctor adds, 8220;it8217;s difficult to walk the scientific fence8221; 8212; dodging criticism from 8220;the hard-core skeptics8221; who dismiss alternative medicine as quackery and the 8220;hard-core advocates8221; who accept it uncritically.

Jonas has headed the institute 8212; named for its principal benefactor, California philanthropist Susan Samueli 8212;since its inception in 2001. What began as a two-person foundation has grown into a research organization with four offices and a staff of 15. It has an annual budget of about 4 million provided by the Samueli family, and an additional 5 million in contracts from the Department of Defense DOD to study alternative treatments. Currently the institute is funding about 50 projects, awarding grants ranging from 20,000 to 250,000 to researchers in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Among the DOD-related projects, which are a collaboration with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the military medical school in Bethesda, where Jonas is a clinical professor, are several to determine whether the use of extremely diluted poisons, including cyanide and botulinum toxin, might protect soldiers from higher doses to which they could be exposed in biological warfare.

8220;The work in this area is in its earliest stages but has some promising characteristics,8221; said Iris R. Bell, director of research for the integrative medicine program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. 8220;The Samueli staff are open-minded scientists, they are not taking anything as dogma. They are asking the bigger questions, such as what are the assumptions of science? I would expect the work they do and the work they fund is going to be controversial.8221;

Critics of the institute say that while they support rigorous research into alternative medical treatments, Samueli is not doing it. 8220;There is nothing of scientific value they8217;re doing that I8217;m aware of,8221; said Wallace Sampson, editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford. 8220;They8217;re all ideologues trying to prove something that doesn8217;t exist.8221;

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Homeopathy, a treatment invented in the late 1700s, is predicated on the belief that 8220;like cures like8221; and that illnesses can be treated by stimulating a healing response through the ingestion of highly diluted substances such as herbs, heavy metals or poison ivy, which would cause harm at larger doses. In most cases no single molecule of the substance remains.

Sampson and other critics of Samueli8217;s work also question use of terminology not found in science, such as 8220;information biology8221;, which Jonas defines as 8220;the interaction of information with biological systems8221;; and 8220;salutogenesis8221;, which he says is the process of healing and the opposite of pathogenesis, the process of disease. Bruce Flamm, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, summed it

up: 8220;We have to keep an open mind, but not an open mind to nonsense.8221;

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