A Prayer Before Dying

"Elisabeth is our hero. She's a wonderful, groundbreaking researcher." - Dr. Mitchell Krucoff, Duke University

"Medical research has shown that people who believe in God or in prayer generally fare better than those who don't. What remains unproven is whether prayer itself makes a difference." - Dr. Herbert Benson, Harvard Medical School

"Nobody would dispute that for a great many people, religion provides comfort in times of distress, medical or otherwise. But there is no really good, compelling evidence that there is a relationship between religious involvement and health."

- Dr. Richard Sloan, Columbia University

Question 1: Based on these quotes, what would a reader of an ensuing article likely conclude? a) That most doctors think her research is a bogus waste of time and money. b) That doctors are evenly divided but open-minded about the prayer effect.

Question 2: Which is closest to the truth, a or b?

What You Might Want To Know About Her Upbringing

"She had more permission to be psychic than anyone in history," proudly offers her father, Russell Targ, who in the 1970s conducted CIA-funded experiments in extrasensory perception at Stanford. Subjects in his lab attempted to describe objects hidden inside boxes and tried to get better at it through repetition, as if it was a learnable skill, like riding a unicycle. During the Cold War, his psychics would sit in a chair and calm their minds until they received visions and diagrams of certain military bases in Russia.

Russell had an ESP machine, an early computer that asked subjects which of four colors they thought would randomly appear onscreen. Targ began training on the machine at age 10. When she played hide-and-seek with a girlfriend, Targ would attempt to find her by means of clairvoyance. She was expected to call out what was in her Christmas presents before opening them; if she guessed incorrectly, her father teased her: "What's wrong with you?"

"I expected her to be intelligent, polite, and psychic," says Russell. He was a force. He was famous. He had helped invent the laser while at Lockheed. Her uncle was the world chess champion, Bobby Fischer. Greatness was assumed.

And Targ was exceedingly bright. By the time she entered Palo Alto High School, she'd already skipped two grades. At 12, she was helping a Stanford researcher stick electrodes into monkey brains to examine hemispheric specialization. That's also when she conducted her first human experiment: demonstrating that left-handed people make more spelling errors than right-handed people. At 13, she tested crayfish feeding reflexes. In high school, she cofounded the debate team. "Truth through dialog" was her motto.

She graduated from high school at 15, in 1977. Fluent in Russian - as well as French and German - she got a job in a psychology research department at Stanford, translating studies from the Soviet Union. Since Russia was an atheist country, parapsychology didn't carry the religious taboo it did here, and she was exposed to a lot of it. In her first semester at Pomona College, she conducted a study that took her father's favorite experiment - attempting to describe objects hidden inside boxes - and subjected it to double-blinded, randomized scientific rigor. This time, neither subject nor experimenter knew what had been placed in the box. Her teacher hated it; she transferred to Stanford.

To her best friend, Janice Boughton, Targ simply seemed open-minded, influenced by those Russian studies she'd translated. "Parapsychology was her hobby, as if she played the trombone."

During college, she would fool around with notions of being able to manipulate events in the near future. She called it Associative Remote Viewing. Hoping to be awarded grants for her research, she would associate that grant with an ordinary object, such as a vase or a teddy bear; then she and her friends would visualize this vase or teddy bear frequently, believing that the visualization would make the desired outcome more likely. She used a variation on this method when she got accepted to Stanford, and later, when she and Comings were trying to find an affordable house in San Francisco.

She also put a lot of stock in her own intuition and dreams. All through her life, she had a recurring dream in which a birthday cake with 42 candles appeared (once, it was 42 birthday cakes). Targ became convinced this was a sign that she would die. At 42. Next year. 2003.

All of which raises the question: Does her backstory as an ESP hobbyist make us regard her work with some suspicion? It has to - in the same way that her Stanford Medical School degree affords her legitimacy. The whole point of randomized, double-blind trials is to eliminate bias. On TV, Targ presented herself as just another medical researcher, but if she spent her entire life in search of the paranormal, it's not surprising that she eventually found traces of it.

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