Nuns Donate Their Brains to Alzheimer's Research 148
Many Catholic religious orders are participating in a long range Alzheimer's disease study. Rush University's Religious Orders Study began in 1993 and tracks the participants' mental abilities through yearly memory testing. In addition to the annual tests, the study subjects agree to donate their brains. From the article: "The researchers sought members of religious orders, hoping they would be willing to donate and would not have children or spouses interfering with that arrangement at the last minute. More than 1,100 nuns, priests and brothers across the country representing a wide range of ethnic groups are taking part."
Re:Mental Capabilities? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not? Like it or not, it is fairly normal to believe in religion.
I don't think that has anything to do with it. I remember reading elsewhere that nuns are ideal test subjects for longitudinal studies because the affect of a lot of independent variables can be eliminated or reduced when compared to people who have a more normal lifestyle.
Re:Results will be useless (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, unless there is some atypical distribution between alzheimers in religious an non-religious brains, I seriously doubt that what you suggest will actually affect what they're studying.
They have access to 850+ brains of aging people, all of which will go through annual testing to check for degradation in skills and the like, and be able to compare that to long-term medical histories. Getting that big of a sample of anybody is a huge big deal -- the fact that some of these people have been in this survey since the early 90's gives them a truckload of data, and speaks volumes about how helpful and committed they've been.
I'm the first to disagree with mindless adherence to religion, but these ladies are willingly participating in science, so we're not talking drooling zealots who think the Earth is 6000 years old. Hell, one of the smartest (and nicest) people I ever met was an old Jesuit Priest who was a university lecturer in physics and astronomy at the university I went to. He was nice enough to let me access his UNIX machine since the CS department didn't have one and I wanted to learn it.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- the religious people who can accept the science can be pretty nice people, and they're generally not talking about things that science can intelligently speak to (or even want to). They're certainly not all groping the choice boys or smacking people with rulers. Like with the rest of society, that's a small subset of the overall population.
You're still breathing, so it's not too late to open your mind. :-P
Re:As someone who has worked with Religious Folk. (Score:3, Interesting)
Your appeal to authority fallacy notwithstanding, it's worth pointing out that many people who believe in UFO's, bigfoot, and the JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theories also have PHD's etc. Having a piece of paper from a fancy school doesn't mean you're not an idiot, it just means you can focus on a task and have a higher IQ than a chimp.
On the other hand, success in the scientific fields can be directly correlated with religiosity - those who do the best work and contribute the most to our understanding of the universe are FAR less likely to be religious than their more mediocre counterparts.
Re:Mental Capabilities? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What if they discover ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Well that's about the same way the religious are 'tolerant' of atheists ("Oh you poor misguided soul. Well you're going to hell unless you convert but you're a good person"), gays ("hate the sin not the sinner" [except half the time that one ends with "murder the 'sinner', claim he was coming on to me, watch me get a slap on the wrist from a jury full of rednecks"]) and anyone else they disagree with, and while I don't think we should stoop to their level if they can't take a little sassy talk in their direction they shouldn't be part of the archaic, hate-mongering, little-boy-diddling, woman stoning, suicide bombing, abortion doctor killing, regressive, pointless thought cancer that's eating our society and enabling assholes to run-amok (not that they wouldn't anyway, but they hardly need the help) the world over.
Religion is the bane of rational thought and one of the biggest barriers to continued progress we face today. The sooner we give up superstitions created to give comfort as we cowered, ignorant in the desert, scared of the thunder and baffled by the rain the sooner we can reach for the stars as a united people. So while I don't hate (most) religious people I do hate religion and I do feel sorry for those trapped in that mental box