The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • Page Z012

12 SUNDAY Dec. 4 10, 2005 The New Mexican magazine BOOKS A very bright 12-year-old girl I know believes that Earth was created by God 6,000 years ago. She believes this because her preacher told her so. Her 8-year-old brother has long been enamored of dinosaurs. The girl reconciles the discrepancy this way: Dinosaurs roamed Earth for millions of years, but God was not satisfied, so he destroyed them and created Earth anew, and mankind with it, far more recently.

My little friends came to mind while I was reading a new book by the Dalai Lama called The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality The main title is a throwaway the subtitle is what the book is about. In it, the Dalai Lama, in a topical opinion perhaps surprising in a religious leader, states early and often that when scientific proofs conflict with ancient dogma, it is the dogma, not the science, that must be changed. The author finds no conflict between science and religion perhaps because Buddhism is a nontheistic religion. It does not concern itself with God, but rather with how to alleviate human suffering, both physical and mental. In this search, he notes, science and religion can be partners science combating the physical aspects of suffering, religion the mental.

Indeed, he views Buddhism and who should know better? as an investigative tool, just as science is. But where science proves or disproves its theories objectively, Buddhism looks inward, with subjective meditation a terrain into which objective science by definition cannot venture. Thus, science has proved that evolution is no longer a theory, he writes, but it can never reveal the nature of life, whether the soul exists, whether reincarnation is possible. The Dalai Lama has been interested in science since his boyhood in Tibet. He sponsors annual scientific conferences near his home in exile in India that are attended by many of the leading physicists.

He has assiduously attempted to grasp quantum mechanics, which has radically challenged many of ancient beliefs. Much of the first half of the book is devoted to trying to explain it, though the author quotes the late physicist Richard Feynman as having said, think I can safely say that no one understands quantum At the same time, the Dalai Lama seriously questions scientific materialism. this he writes, the assumption that, in the final analysis, matter, as it can be described by physics and as it is governed by the laws of physics, is all there is. Accordingly, this view would uphold that psychology can be reduced to biology, biology to chemistry, and chemistry to physics. My concern here is to draw attention to a vitally important point: that these ideas do not constitute scientific knowledge; rather they represent a philosophical, in fact a metaphysical, position.

The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls On a recent flight into Albuquerque, my seat-mate was a geologist from Pennsylvania, who told me of a physics conference back east that had planned to invite the Dalai Lama to speak. When word of this got out, there was a torrent of protest against a religious leader addressing a scientific conference and the plan was shelved. Proving, perhaps, that intellectual bigotry can exist on any side of an argument. Robert Mayer Mayer is a Santa Fe author and editor. What science can and cannot know, according to the Dalai Lama THE UNIVERSE IN A SINGLE ATOM: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality By the Dalai Lama Morgan Road Books 216 pages, $24.95 You can blame hortages of flu vaccine on botched batches of polio vaccine in 1955.

So says Paul Offit in The Cutter Incident: How First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis By the early 1950s the polio epidemic was in full swing and parents across the country were in a panic. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded in 1938 at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt a polio vic- tim himself was raising money by the bucketful to fund research. One of the researchers was Jonas Salk, who was trying to develop a killed-virus vaccine, one that would inject a virus that has been killed by chemical means (formaldehyde) into a patient to stimulate a immune-system response. name came close to being reviled instead of honored. A large field trial of his vaccine had led the government to declare it safe.

But in 1955, cases of immunized children coming down with polio started to show up. These cases came in children inoculated with vaccine from Cutter Laboratories in California. After some fumbling by government officials, the vaccine was pulled from the market. Too late, because 220,000 people were infected by the virus in the Cutter vaccine; 70,000 developed muscle weakness, 164 were severely paralyzed and 10 died. Investigations pointed to the virus surviving the killing process because of faulty filtering methods.

Cutter was sued, of course; the first trial was Gottsdanker vs. Cutter Laboratories in 1958, brought by the parents of Anne Elizabeth Gottsdanker, who contracted polio through the vaccine. jury had found that Cutter Laboratories was not negligent in the production of polio vaccine, but Cutter was still financially responsible (liable) for harm caused by its Offit writes. without negligence (fault) was This has led drug companies to get out of the vaccine-production business. sue pharmaceutical companies because we want them to pay for our health care and we want to punish he writes.

The consequences could be dire, Offit warns. He quotes Anne Gottsdanker as saying she wishes the Cutters, owners of the lab where the contaminated vaccine was produced, could see her now using crutches to walk, wearing a brace to protect a knee that is easily dislocated, suffering from being treated as a second-class citizen. Offit then says, partly because of the verdict of the Gottsdanker suit, grandchildren could face diseases that could be stopped by vaccines but be. in an attempt to protect children from harm, we have inadvertently exposed them to a greater Terry England England is the Books page editor. The consequences of the polio vaccine batch that went wrong THE CUTTER INCIDENT: How First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis By Paul A.

Offit Yale University Press 238 pages, $27.50.