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."
What's the name on the brain? (Score:1)
Abby.
Abby what?
Abby Normal.
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What kind of brains do you have?
The grey kind.... Both of them...
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It was a hard habit to break.
An Elaborate Scheme (Score:4, Funny)
Nice trie, zombie scum! Your little charade won't fool me, you want this grey matter you've got to work for it. NO FREEBIES!
Nun brains always determine the same cure (Score:1, Troll)
Rap his knuckles with a heavy wooden ruler. Don't think that's doing to do much for research.
They heard (Score:5, Funny)
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Ummm Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that the environmental structure is common to all persons at the location, it should remove some of the variables that exist and allow researchers to focus on the changes over time with regards to the disease itself rather than the differences that would be experienced with a geographical larger study.
Re:Ummm Yes (Score:5, Informative)
WNYC's Radiolab did a very similar story involved nuns donating their brains to Alzheimer's research. It was the University of Minnesota though, so it may also have been a different group of nuns.:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127211884 [npr.org]
Basicly, you are right. They Nuns were a good choice because (as they put it):
The study looked at writing as an indicator of Alzheimer's risk. And they chanced upon a jackpot - all the sisters in the study had essays that they had written at 18 or 19, roughly 70 years earlier.
Do yourself a favor and listen to that episode, or at least read the transcript.
Nuts (Score:1)
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Oh come on people, stop bashing the old biddies. (Score:5, Insightful)
How is their decision to stay in a religiously themed communal housing structure any different (from the standpoint of the cultural norm) from your decision to avoid sunlight and social interactions, and to live in your mother's basement collecting manga, video game paraphernalia, and a super huge collection of raunchy porn locked away on an encrypted filesystem?
These people are motivated by their religious precepts to help other people, and believe in a spiritual afterlife. As such, they are less concerned about what happens to their bodies after they die than some other people, and more concerned about how they can continue helping people after they are gone (at least the ones that aren't pedophile priests anyway). Their brains get Alzheimers just like everyone elses, and such a huge turnout (over 1000 individuals in the study, for something that requires you to donate your brain, is a pretty huge turnout) means that there is a considerable chance that significant findings could be obtained through the study. That kind of thing alone merits some form of hat tipping.
Why is everybody poking fun that they are all celibate, instead of praising them for their altruism in this respect? I mean, it's not like the average slashdot reader gets busy every friday night in his mother's basement you know. (no, Palmula Handerson and a bottle of Jergins doesn't count.)
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Maybe it's got something to do with a diet of anything other than Twinkies?
Fuck you all (Score:1)
The whole process is annoying and gross and their doing it to help people. I'm no fan of Catholicism or the Abrahamic God, but they're doing good.
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their doing it to
Ah, fuck...
As someone who has worked with Religious Folk. (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone with religious tolerance and have actually have worked with catholic Priests, Nuns, Monks, Bishops, etc... A lot of these people are Smart and have PHD and MDs in many areas of science and often with other areas of study as well. Don't let the traditional dress fool you, these people are actually well educated with sharp minds.
Just because you don't agree with their religion or religion in general, don't let yourself think for a second that these people are any less then you.
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"Just because you don't agree with their religion or religion in general, don't let yourself think for a second that these people are any less then you."
Thank you jellomizer for saying this. It is astonishing to me that such an obvious statement even needs saying, but, apparently it does. Actually I can't imagine why traditional dress should "fool" anyone into assuming the wearer is uneducated or unintelligent. Perhaps I give people too much credit.
Pam
http://www.talksocialnews.com
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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
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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.
That's a rather ignorant assertion. The Scientific Method has nothing to do with a person's religious faith. But since you want to dabble in stereotypes, there may indeed be a coorelation between 'lost soul' spiritually hollow types who never make i
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The Scientific Method has nothing to do with a person's religious faith
No, that is an ignorant assertion. Historically, religion has been on a constant retreat, as the scientific method has proved one dogma after another untenable.
(Religions like Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity are now trying to cling to authority with pseudo-science like "natural law" and "creation science", but such ideas don't hold up to scientific scrutiny.)
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Actually a lot of those people are often stereotyped as atheists who are wondering trying to find some greater force in the world.
The fact that many people in the science field are openly hostile towards religious people couldn't be a factor that Religious people contribute less to some areas of study.
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Actually a lot of those people are often stereotyped as atheists who are wondering trying to find some greater force in the world.
And rightly so.
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I'm going to have to call 'citation needed' on you there. Einstein was quite clearly a believer in God. Many others have some sort of spiritual belief outside the realm of science. It's not uncommon for a physicist to accept on faith that there is some great intelligence out there and that through physics they may better understand it. I've heard that from mathematicians as well.
They may simply be far less likely to talk about it openly to avoid a bias against anyone in the academic world that professes a r
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Definitely not in the traditional way, no [wikiquote.org]
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Certainly he wasn't a believer in a personal god but that's not the same as being an Atheist or un-religious.
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Well, I'd hardly call him religious. I think he comes closest to agnostic.
His god doesn't define morality, care about people, or affect the world. It works with rigid rules that are never deviated from, and due to this can be scientifically tested. He has nobody to pray to, no heaven and hell, no religious source of morality, and no dogma.
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Buddhism is generally described as a religion.
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But it has rules and a prescribed morality (the five precepts), an afterlife (nirvana), a hell (naraka), a prophet (buddha), divine beings (asuras and devas) and religious texts (vinaya and sutras)
Einstein's stated beliefs include none of those.
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Er, the KKK was a group composed of Protestants. Since they all were religious I'd be very surprised if it could spliter that way.
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Any comment which includes the phrase "Einstein was quite clearly a believer in God" is clearly a troll.
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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.
Citation, please?
And for a nice example of an anti-religious bigot leading a nasty crusade to discredit a theory that was later vindicated, please see Jesuit physicist George LeMaitre's "primordial atom theory" which is known to this day by Fred Hoyle's derisive epithet, "the big bang theory".
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Citation, please?
One example:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html [stephenjaygould.org]
And for a nice example of an anti-religious bigot leading a nasty crusade to discredit a theory that was later vindicated, please see Jesuit physicist George LeMaitre's "primordial atom theory" which is known to this day by Fred Hoyle's derisive epithet, "the big bang theory".
You should provide more detail if you expect me to see anything. Otherwise you may as well write "as an example of quantum mechanics, see rocks".
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Religion and Science are not really in conflict, just the ignorant people think that is such. Now parts of the religion can be put in question about their truthfulness. However most non-radicalized religions accept the idea that there is a literary truth and a physical truth. They can Accecpt that Jesus turned Water into Wine, and at the same time that there is no possible way to do this, without stripping the water atoms fusing together hydrogen atoms to make the carbon and other atoms and form molecule
These nuns provide an important service to AD res (Score:4, Informative)
The reality is that nuns are a very good group of subjects, since they not only donate their brains after death - which is essential in determining AD status, but we have full medical histories on them for many decades.
None of our current studies focus on religion. The major risk factors are genetic and linked to diet and lifestyle.
Thanks for helping, sisters!
We're donating my grandma's brain (Score:2)
They got the story wrong! (Score:2)
The way I heard this story was that a group of researchers were seeking brains for the study of Alzheimer's and they got NONE.
I consider myself a radical athiest... (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously guys, you are going way, way out there in this nun hate.
Resurrection (Score:2)
How will they be resurrected for Judgement Day when their brains are missing?
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why not? might give insight into why people are drawn to specific topics... it also will be fairly good baseline since those in these orders will have documented and controlled diets, so will form a good base for comparing against each other at least.
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Are these really the brains we want as our basis for research?
You think yours would be better somehow?
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Are these really the brains we want as our basis for research?
You think yours would be better somehow?
Mine would be since I never use it, having found something else to think with.
Speaking of which I'm very disappointed this headline wasn't code for sexy women in nun outfits giving head to old guys. I've got a fetish, you see.
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The data's already been copied and reconstructed. The physical substrate is useless.
If we want to understand better why the substrate degrades, then, well, yeah.
Re:Mental Capabilities? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not? Like it or not, it is fairly normal to believe in religion.
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.
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I can think of other parts of nuns that might be useful for research, since they've hardly been used.
Old Catholic school joke: Q:What kind of sex do priests have? A: Nun.
Boy we were really naive back in those days.
They are good subjects, so we shouldn't use them? (Score:2)
I was responding to a post that questioned using nuns, assuming the poster was objecting to the 'abnormality' of religious belief.
You respond by saying, that's not it at all, nuns make better test subjects. But he wasn't implying they were better, he was implying they were worse. I assumed he was referring to nuns religious beliefs as the reason not to use them. I guess I just don't understand your reply. You do not address my question: why did the original poster claim nuns would make bad test subjects? Yo
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I was responding to a post that questioned using nuns, assuming the poster was objecting to the 'abnormality' of religious belief.
You respond by saying, that's not it at all, nuns make better test subjects. But he wasn't implying they were better, he was implying they were worse. I assumed he was referring to nuns religious beliefs as the reason not to use them. I guess I just don't understand your reply. You do not address my question: why did the original poster claim nuns would make bad test subjects? Your answer explains why they are good test subjects.
Ummm, yes...
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Meh, I'm agnostic myself. Actually, I'm not really agnostic or even athiestic. What do you call it when you don't even think the answer to the question "does God exist?" could possibly be important? Believe if you like, or don't, it doesn't matter. I just don't like it when people are needlessly and illogically antagonistic.
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That's it! I'm a militant apathetist. My motto shall be "Even God doesn't care if he exists or not."
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I just think the idea of being militantly apathetic is funny.
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Well, I prefer to wear no clothing but society has these odd rules about that. And, to be fair, sometimes it gets cold and pants are nice.
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Well, ah, you know, the missus and I agreed not to talk about that in public...
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Maybe a lot can be learned from women who choose a celibate, isolated, and cloistered lifestyle
And remain there. An older coworker of mine "stole" his wife from a convent. He actually managed to de-nunnify a nun and marry her :). Despite being one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, we always joke that he's going to Hell for that one regardless :).
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Re:Mental Capabilities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why your question? Perhaps you are not a fan of religion in general, or catholicism in particular? Like the rest of us, they probably believe every religion they don't belong to is misguided.
Unlike the rest of us, they have made the extraordinary decision to dedicate their lives completely to the service of others. If somehow a bias for altruism sneaks into some neurologic baseline, perhaps DSM-V will someday list greed as a psychosis. No other problems seem obvious to me.
I doubt monastic brains are hardwired for superstition any more than those of the general population. Of those slashdotters who believe that we are visited by extra-terrestrials, how many came to that conclusion based on the forensic evidence and proven physics?
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Like the rest of us, they probably believe every religion they don't belong to is misguided.
Speak for yourself. Intolerance of other religions and an assumption of absolute truth are largely errors of the Abrahamic religions.
I doubt monastic brains are hardwired for superstition any more than those of the general population.
I'm sure they are, actually, but it doesn't matter that they are not representative of the general population.
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Speak for yourself. Intolerance of other religions and an assumption of absolute truth are largely errors of the Abrahamic religions.
>
Clearly there are some religions that are more tolerant of people who believe other things, but for the most part, religions are mutually exclusive. You can be a nice Buddhist or something and maybe tolerate everyone, but that doesn't mean that if Buddhism's ultimate world view is right that somehow the other religions can be right. Nirvana isn't heaven. And there is either one, none, or many gods, but you can't have all of them at the same time.
If there was a religion that had at its central tenet that
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Clearly there are some religions that are more tolerant of people who believe other things, but for the most part, religions are mutually exclusive. You can be a nice Buddhist or something and maybe tolerate everyone, but that doesn't mean that if Buddhism's ultimate world view is right that somehow the other religions can be right.
Oh, there are many more possibilities. Some religions believe that all religions (including their own) are incomplete and flawed because human understanding is limited. To such
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Fuck you.
No, seriously: Fuck You.
Just one of these women does more real, genuine capital 'G' Good in a week than a land-fill of snarky Internet tough guys like you will do in your entire life.
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Just one of these women does more real, genuine capital 'G' Good in a week than a land-fill of snarky Internet tough guys like you will do in your entire life.
These women would do Good even if they weren't part of an ancient, evil, lying, murderous cult; more, actually, because they wouldn't be recruiting into that cult.
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Amen
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Let that hatred drain out of you. It's probably good therapy.
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Let that hatred drain out of you. It's probably good therapy.
Good advice; you should give it to the Pope and his cardinals and bishops, who call anybody who disagrees with their theology "evil", "immoral", "not fully human", and "disordered".
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Such as?
Honest question, no intention of trolling. It's my understanding that nuns largely remove themselves from normal society, and as such don't really do much good in the way I understand it.
Note that as an atheist my definition of "good", especially with a "capital G" doesn't include religious functions that don't benefit the society outside thei
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I suppose there may still be a few of those medieval-style cloisters around, but most orders of nuns today are engaged dawn to dusk in charitable works involving AIDS hospices, orphanages, care for the elderly, education, disaster relief, etc. Think less Hildegard von Bingen and more Mother Theresa of Calcutta.
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That I would consider a good thing indeed, so long that they don't follow Mother Theresa's footsteps.
All I've read about her makes her considerably more evil than good in my view. She expressed a very bizarre love for poverty. Not for poor people and their problems, but poverty. As in she seems to have believed that being in a seriously screwed up situation of abject poverty is a good and virtuous thing, and that her task is to sort of bask in that atmosphere without trying to fix it.
A quote of hers that ex
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Well, then perhaps you clarify things for me then. Before making my first post, I checked wikipedia just in case, and got this:
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The Lancet and The British medical Journal [wikipedia.org] both disagree with your anecdotal assesment of the quality of care offered by the missionaries of charity. Like many fanatical Catholics Mother Theresa was a strong adherent to the masochistic belief that the path to enlightenment is through poverty and suffering.
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Again you are making the mistake of conflating your opinions on her spiritual beliefs with the good that her charity provides. You disagree with her thoughts on God, leading you to believe those thoughts are causing her to intentionally inflict suffering on people already suffering. Do they have enough doctors? No, they don't. Do they have enough medicine? No, they don't. OD they have any of the advanced diagnostic equipment that modern western medicine has? Again No. They do their best with what they have
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Pretty much everything she says goes against what you say here. I'm quite sure that she has helped some people, but according to herself, the way she does it is very twisted. Some choice quotes from her address at the National Prayer Breakfast [ewtn.com]:
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How are you so sure of that? Did you hack into Santa's computer and get to see my good and bad lists?
Also, RobotRunAmok's post implied that they do good deeds on a regular basis. Considering my understanding of that they live in isolation and as such whatever they do doesn't really affect society, it seems to be perfectly fair to me to ask what kind o
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Sure we do. They are in excellent condition. Stored indoors most of the time. Only one owner. A sweet old lady who only used them on Sunday for going to church.
Re:What if they discover ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. Lot of caring people in this thread, who bash other peoples beliefs, while I'm sure they tout that they're very tolerant.
Let me know if your brainwave applies to MS as well. Two monasteries around here have members who donate.
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Let's step away from religion for a moment. I can't STAND strong accents that to me sound like they're spoken by illiterates. "Ebonics" (Let me axs ya a kestun), Boston folks who can't pronounce Rs, southern drawls. Makes me wonder if these people never had a TV to teach them how to talk.
But I know we're all a product of our environment and also more than than sum of our parts. I may think you talk like a goofball. But I'm j
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You know, it is possible to scorn religion without scorning the religious. ... Same for religion. You can bash irrational beliefs in magic sky dictators, while still loving and befriending the people who suffer under such beliefs. That's why they call it "tolerance" and not "blind acceptance".
Odd. You've just successfully argued against yourself, by bashing what a person believes in but saying it's all okay, here have hugs and cookies, and saying by the way, your beliefs suck. Tolerance is about not stepping on someones toes, or disagreeing with what they believe in while not stating that they 'suffer' from something.
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Funny. Very tolerant view, religion is the bane of rational thought, yet I'll bet that you'll find that many members of the scientific community are religious in some way. Or you can look at heavily religious countries(heya Israel) who have more phd's and published papers per-capita than anywhere else in the world.
Religion isn't the problem. The problem is religion which has never had reformations, or branches which actively encourage people into things which aren't the norm of society. For the sake of
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Except for the 10% who identify themselves as atheists.
"Or you can look at heavily religious countries(heya Israel) "
What do you call a jew that does not belive in god? - Answer - A jew [wikipedia.org]. Israel is much closer to a typical European state than the US when it comes to religious belief, about one third of Israeli's label themselves as either atheist or agnostic.
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What if they discover the other way around?
Plus with this data set you would not be able to tell, simply by the definition of the dataset. I swear what do they teach at the jr/sr high level these days... Oh and I learned scientific rigor AT a christian school. Want an F in science? Dont follow the scientific method. You would have got an F on that paper. As your whole assumption can not be proven with that data set. You are trying to apply science to something that can not be proven. There is such a
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..Alzheimer is consequence of too much religious brain-wash?
As far as my grandmas go, going to the church too much does fry your neurons!
No, it is a consequence of too much internet brainwashing. You anti-religious trolls all sound the same. Do you go through a training course somewhere?
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Many people graduate and LEAVE college. The learning process has just begun when you get that degree, you know.
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You mean like this one [youtube.com]? - No, thankfully we don't.
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
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Doh. That, of course, should be "choir boys". :-P
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Well, unless there is some atypical distribution between alzheimers in religious an non-religious brains,
This is exactly what must be determined first. If you're just taking names at random from the general population you're allowed to say you have a representative sample. If you start picking and choosing, you have to prove that your sample matches the general population FIRST. It's like surveying people about how they like the public school system at the golf pro shop or the tennis club.
Re:Results will be useless (Score:4, Insightful)
If you start picking and choosing, you have to prove that your sample matches the general population FIRST.
Nonsense. They study Alzheimers in nuns, period. If they find something that's interesting regardless of whether it is specific to nuns or not. If they come up with a treatment in nuns, they can then apply it to the general population and see whether it works. They don't need to show that anything matches the general population "FIRST". Heck, we do tons of medical research in mice, and they certainly don't match the general population.
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You must be new here
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You should have left out the last sentence. New drugs do not go directly from mice to the general population.
I didn't say they did. You should have used your brain.
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You should have read the third sentence and applied it to the context.
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So what you are saying is that people like you hate religion so much because of brain damage you suffered at some point?