US neurologists have raised objections to plans for exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama to open their annual convention, saying that a non-scientist has no place lecturing them about science.
More than 700 members of the Society for Neuroscience petitioned the organization to rescind its invitation to the Buddhist leader to give the inaugural lecture at their conference in Washington next month.
"What I object to is having a non-scientist address a scientific community about science," said Nancy Hayes, a neurobiologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.
Some 30,000 scientists from around the world are expected to attend the Neuroscience 2005 conference, where more than 17,000 neurology-related research presentations and over 50 symposia are scheduled, according to the society.
The Dalai Lama is to address the group on the neuroscience of meditation, based on the work of US researchers looking to see whether the intense meditation practiced by Buddhist monks can generate positive emotions.
Several US scientists argued last year in a research paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a leading US science journal, that the self-induced state of meditators they studied could result in short-term and long-term neural changes.
While Hayes did not object to examining the neurological aspects of meditation, she called the conclusions of the research "debatable" and "very soft."
"There is no doubt that you can record changes that occur in the brain when people are meditating," Hayes said.
"It's the conclusions that are very, very soft at this point," she said, adding that it is not clear that the conclusions can be replicated.
The Dalai Lama has long been seeking scientific proof of the benefits of meditation.
The Mind and Life Institute, of which he is honorary chairman, will host a conference in Washington on the science and clinical applications of meditation, co-sponsored by two respected university medical centers, just days before the neuroscience conference.
The petition against the Dalai Lama's address to the neuroscience conference was begun in August on a petition Web site.
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