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The following is a review of: "A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Coverup, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo" by John Crewsdon, Little, Brown & Co. Twelve years ago, Robert Gallo was chief of the laboratory for tumor-cell biology at the National Cancer Institute and one of the world's most celebrated scientists. In 1984 Margaret Heckler, secretary of health and human services, had hailed Gallo as the discoverer of the virus that causes AIDS and the inventor of the first test for the virus. Gallo had received virtually every major prize for medical research except the Nobel. Samuel Broder, director ...

Between Science and SpiritualityBy JOHN HORGAN Can mystical spirituality be reconciled with science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical philosopher Ken Wilber, is the East's version of enlightenment compatible with that of the West? If so, what sort of truth would a rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation? There are many claimed convergences between science and mysticism. Cognitive psychology supposedly corroborates the Buddhist doctrine that the self is an illusion. Quantum mechanics, which implies that the outcomes of certain microevents depend on how we measure them, is said to confirm the mystical intuition that consciousness...

John Horgan is a talented science writer with a nasty case of metaphysical anxiety. Near the end of his 1996 book The End of Science, he recounted a harrowing (and drug-induced) vision he once had in which a terror-stricken God created the world to stave off solitude and nonexistence. That episode, which occurred in his college years, left Horgan with a longstanding interest in mystical experiences, which are the subject of his new book Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality. Mysticism, although difficult to define precisely, is typically reported to involve experiences of profound connection...

Belief and Unbelief, Side by Side (6 Letters) Published: December 19, 2004 To the Editor: Re "Keeping the Faith in My Doubt," by John Horgan (Op-Ed, Dec. 12): Like Mr. Horgan, I am concerned about the extreme power of conservatism rooted in religion. It offers a clear, emotional ideology to go about living in a complex world by believing it is simple. According to Mr. Horgan, the United Universists, of which I am director, should give up our effort at organization out of principle because all organizations are flawed. But he offers no viable alternative, which speaks for itself. I...

How Physics Lost Its Fizz Physics, which decades ago seemed capable of answering the deepest mysteries of existence, is now just recycling once-exciting ideas By John Horgan on January 18, 2016 For a lapsed Catholic like me, physics represented a kind of scientific theology, an empirical, rational way of probing the mysteries of existence. Physicists were discerning resonances between the smallest and largest scales of reality and spinning out astonishing conjectures about our universe and even other universes. ...snip... Physicists' fantasies about parallel and virtual realms are not just stale. Increasingly, they strike me as escapist and even irresponsible, because...

I once admired Jefferson, seeing him as an essentially good, no, great man with one tragic flaw: The writer of the inspiring words “all men are created equal” owned slaves. Now, I see Jefferson as an egregious hypocrite, who willfully betrayed the ideals he espoused. I reached this conclusion only after visiting Monticello, Jefferson’s famous Virginia estate, last month. Previously, I didn't realize the extent of Jefferson’s slave ownership, and I lazily—and ignorantly--excused it as a common ethical blind spot of his time. *Jefferson often denounced slavery. He wrote in 1774, "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object...

As anyone remotely interested in science knows by now, 100 years ago Einstein wrote six papers that laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics and relativity, arguably the two most successful theories in history. To commemorate Einstein's "annus mirabilis," a coalition of physics groups has designated 2005 the World Year of Physics. The coalition's Web site lists more than 400 celebratory events, including conferences, museum exhibits, concerts, Webcasts, plays, poetry readings, a circus, a pie-eating contest and an Einstein look-alike competition. In the midst of all this hoopla, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of Einstein's legacy: the widespread belief...