Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon. Well, how are you doing today? I don't know why, but for some strange reason I seem
 to get the blouse before the holidays rather than after them. So I guess you could say
 that my energy level is a bit low today, but there really isn't any good reason for that
 being the case. And so I've decided to put out another podcast just to cheer myself up
 by joining you in the salon for a little visit. I've had several programs lined up, well almost
 lined up, that I think you're really going to enjoy, but not one of them has finally
 come together just yet from permission standpoints and things like that. And so I'm afraid that
 I've also been overloading you on Terrence McKenna lectures lately, so I decided to compromise
 and play another one of the Trilog tapes. I think it was last October that I last played
 one of these three-way conversations between the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the mathematician
 Ralph Abraham, and well, what shall I call him, the Bard McKenna, I guess. The tape I'm
 going to play right now is a little different from some of the others I've been playing.
 First of all, the sound quality isn't all that great. I've had several people take a
 look at it, but the bottom line is that this particular flaw isn't an easy one to fix.
 And for what it's worth, I've got to put up with the bad sound too, and if I let it, it'll
 drive me nuts. So I've actually had to think of parts of this recording as having had sound
 effects added on purpose by some demented DJ, and then it seems okay, you know. At least
 it doesn't bother me as much. Actually, I gave serious thought to not even playing this
 particular recording because it doesn't have all of the sizzle that we normally expect
 when Terrence McKenna is involved, but even if there's only one person who really groks
 the message that Rupert is trying to get across, it'll be worth all of our time, I think. Even
 if becoming a grassroots scientist isn't something you find particularly fascinating,
 well just think about some young Ralph Rupert or Terrence out there who hears this and says,
 "Yes, I'm going to really look into this or that question that science has so far left
 unanswered and I'm going to figure it out for myself." Who knows what might come from
 just one mind, young or old, taking a look at our world from a slightly different direction.
 And even if you don't discover something big and important, just adding to our knowledge
 of this fascinating universe seems worth the effort to me. So I've decided to play this
 along with the rest of the Trilog recordings that Ralph gave me and we'll just have to
 wait and see what comes from them in the months ahead. When I first listened to this tape,
 that I'm about to play, my initial thought was that I should probably cut the first three
 and a half minutes out because what they were doing was more or less trying to just figure
 out how to begin. But then it dawned on me that maybe this was a recording of a private
 Trilog, one without an audience. And if so, I reasoned, well, this would be sort of like
 the basement tapes that Dylan and the band recorded that summer in Woodstock. So I've
 left the tape intact and I'll let you decide for yourself if you want to fast forward to
 where their Trilog actually begins. But maybe you'll enjoy hearing these three great minds
 getting wound up for what sounds like a private Trilog, just the three or maybe four of them.
 So if you've ever wondered what these three amigos talked about when they were alone,
 well, this may be just what you've been waiting for. And as you will hear, this Trilog was
 recorded on September 2nd, 1991. And apparently there was one person there other than the
 three of them, and that was the woman whose voice we hear in the beginning. And I'm not
 sure there's anything new here, to be honest, but I'm going to play this whole series anyway,
 just in case there was something here and what is either a rehearsal or a recording
 session that was possibly intended to be produced as a commercial venture. All I know about
 the tapes are that they were in a batch of cassettes that Ralph Abraham loaned to Bruce
 Dahmer and me to digitize in order to pass along here in the salon. So let's listen to
 this old recording of a possibly private conversation between Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and
 Terrence McKenna.
 It doesn't have to go to six, right?
 No, no, no. I think that we're happy with an hour.
 An hour and a half or two hours. We can stop any time after an hour.
 What happened a little bit in the past is that we were some patient one frequently trying
 to stop it when it's not quite done.
 Yeah, I think it's good to have a time we shoot for, like quarter to six.
 Yes.
 Because we found that we sort of faulted and we would have stopped and then we went
 on.
 It was better.
 Yes.
 This one's on grassroots science. Can I hear it?
 Yes.
 Oh. It's on. I can hear a kind of echo.
 I can hear a kind of echo. Maybe.
 Well, let's see. I don't know where you hear that from.
 Maybe from the headphones.
 Headphones. Ignore it.
 It's sometimes hard to.
 Well, I can mediate it some.
 So maybe we should have a mantra to do with knowledge like whom.
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
 (heavenly music)
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 - So, September the 2nd,
 volume two, number one, 1991.
 Grassroots science.
 The organization of science as we know it
 has become increasingly professional and institutional.
 And big science is increasing in its scope and power
 so that more of physics research gets directed
 into huge projects like the super accelerator.
 A lot of physicists are very worried
 because this is drawing off billions of dollars in funding.
 In biology, the conception of the human genome project
 was brought about by a scientific politician
 who thought, well, if physics can have big science
 and military can, like Star Wars, why can't biology?
 So this was a deliberate attempt to model
 biological research on these huge projects
 involving billions in funding.
 And this project is going ahead.
 It's meant that there's even greater predominance
 of funding in the billions for molecular biology,
 gene sequencing, gene planning, biotechnology,
 that kind of research.
 And inevitably, this attracts funds, prestige, and manpower
 away from the more traditional, low-expense,
 low-prestige branches of biology.
 And this tendency towards big science and bigger centers
 and the predominance of fewer centers of excellence
 is going on all the time.
 The editor of Nature told me last year when I met him
 that there was a tendency for papers now
 coming from smaller institutions to be rejected
 because the peer review process meant that people would say,
 well, why didn't you do a mass spectrograph on that compound?
 Why didn't you do this or that?
 Requiring, as part of the routine production of papers,
 the use of expensive equipment which few have access.
 And he said that although the papers
 may have been of equal merit,
 the standards were changing in favor of large institutions
 and large laboratories.
 And so I said, well, what happens if you raise this question
 with the people who insist on these standards?
 Isn't it unfair on people in smaller institutions
 with lower access to big funds?
 And he said, not really.
 He said, if they're any good,
 they'll move to a big institution.
 So there was this tendency
 for not only increasing specialization,
 but increasing predominance
 of a smaller number of institutions
 and access to big money
 is coming to dominate the whole structure of science
 as we know it.
 And this is merely a carrying further
 of the process of professionalization
 and institutionalization
 that's overtaken mainstream science,
 essentially in the present century.
 In the 19th century and in the 18th,
 and indeed until the present century,
 the situation was very different.
 In Darwin's case, for example,
 he himself never held an academic post in any institution.
 And when one reads books
 like "The Variation of Animals and Plants
 Under Domestication,"
 the research base on which he was drawing
 was that of practical plant breeders,
 animal husbandry people,
 hands-on animal breeders,
 animal trainers, amateur pigeon fanciers,
 colonial administrators
 who'd observed what native people did,
 shipwreck mariners who had stories
 about feral animals on remote islands and so on.
 In other words, there was a vast wealth of knowledge
 that fed into Darwin's kind of science,
 hardly any of which came out
 of government-funded scientific institutions.
 Most of it was low-cost grassroots type of research.
 That doesn't mean to say
 that the people didn't know what they were talking about.
 These were true experts in the sense
 that they'd spent many years doing what they did
 and spoke from a wealth of experience.
 But we see a completely different picture there.
 And what's happened is that the amateur
 and the non-professional base of science
 has become increasingly marginalized
 from the point of view of institutional science.
 You can't do research until you've got a PhD.
 You can't do it unless you're in a big institution.
 You can't do it unless you've got a grant.
 You can't publish it unless you can write
 and do the kind of thing that passes peer review committees
 and so forth.
 Well, the tendency has gone further and further
 in this direction.
 So the question is, do things have to be as they are now?
 Or is there a new model possible?
 Well, I think a new model of science
 is not only possible, but desirable,
 and not only desirable, but necessary.
 Because on the one hand,
 there's a collapse of confidence in big science.
 There's a decline in public support
 for massive scientific projects.
 Genetic engineering is getting a very bad press.
 Embryo research and biotechnology
 excite more public fear than admiration.
 And the same is true of nuclear research,
 particle physics research, Star Wars research,
 and many other aspects of big science.
 One of the results of this
 is that the public esteem for science is declining.
 People blame the environmental crisis,
 nuclear pollution, ecological depletion,
 agribusiness, factory farming, chemicals in food,
 pesticide residues, toxic wastes.
 All these things are blamed fairly or unfairly
 on the scientific establishment.
 And so the constituency that supports science
 declines as a political voice,
 which means that governments seeking to make cuts,
 as they always do, as they have been for years in Britain,
 find it's quite easy to cut science budgets,
 and it won't cause much loss of votes.
 In fact, it may even cause a slight gain in votes.
 They've just axed Britain's main nuclear physics facility,
 the D'Asbury Laboratory near Manchester,
 in which Britain led the world.
 The whole facility has just been axed.
 And there was, apart from scientists themselves
 who worked there and other people in the scientific community,
 scarcely any ripple of protest.
 They saved two million pounds a year.
 So, this, especially in Britain,
 this declining confidence in science
 and declining funding of science
 has led to a reduction in scientific morale.
 Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools
 or go into it as graduate students.
 And there's a declining interest
 in large-scale professional institutional science.
 So the thing is entering a kind of crisis.
 Many scientists are very demoralized.
 And it looks as if the great golden days,
 the golden age of the '60s and '70s,
 of endless expansion is over, perhaps forever.
 Well, in this context,
 a possible new approach to science becomes more feasible
 because it may be necessary
 for simply for economic and political reasons.
 But I think it's desirable,
 even if it weren't for the fact
 that large-scale science is entering a state of crisis.
 And the reason I've been thinking about this
 is because of my own experience
 with morphic resonance research.
 Since this is such an unorthodox theory,
 the theory of memory in nature,
 since it goes against the established paradigm
 or model of science,
 funding has been very hard to come by.
 And what's in fact become apparent
 is that holistic research of the kind that this involves
 is much cheaper than reductionist research.
 If you study whole systems,
 you usually need relatively small funds,
 but the smaller the thing you study,
 the bigger the apparatus and the more the funding.
 So when you get down to the most evanescent
 of nuclear particles,
 you need the largest of apparatus,
 miles across, costing many billions of dollars.
 So morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap,
 indeed, almost free in some cases.
 And much of the leading research
 has been done by students as projects.
 And this has made it clear to me
 that students who do every year
 tens of thousands of projects around the world
 are quite capable of doing leading-edge research.
 They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance.
 But in no other sphere of mainstream science
 could one imagine students routinely
 or playing a major role in the growth of knowledge
 in this way.
 It's also made it clear to me
 that a lot of really interesting
 and important research projects
 can be done on very small budgets
 by students or even by amateurs
 outside the framework of institutional science.
 And the book I'm working on at the moment,
 which has made me think about these things,
 proposes eight experiments
 that any one of which could break our current paradigms,
 but which would be very cheap to do.
 And some could be done by almost anyone.
 For example, investigation of the sense of being stared at
 that we talked about previously,
 which is the discussion in our book of trial marks.
 So I think the conditions are ripe for a new awakening,
 a new renaissance of research,
 a kind of more democratic kind of science
 where more people are empowered to take part.
 And when you think about it,
 the kind of base that Darwin drew on exists today,
 and even more so.
 There are tens of thousands of amateur plant breeders,
 there are amateur orchid growers,
 and people who lavish care, attention, and their own funding
 on breeding new kinds of orchids.
 There are rose societies, there are bamboo societies,
 organized in societies where people swap specimens,
 have a great deal of experience and knowledge
 of their various species of plants.
 And again, with animals,
 there are probably more pigeon fanciers,
 dog breeders, rabbit fanciers, and so on than ever before.
 These, the numbers run into the millions
 of people with a great deal of experience
 of breeding and raising these animals.
 There are people who train horses, dogs,
 there are falconers who train falcons,
 including new species recently domesticated,
 building up a great wealth of knowledge,
 which is all available
 through amateur networks and societies.
 There are anglers and hunters
 who get to know the species they hunt very well.
 There are old-style naturalists still around.
 There are amateurs tracking ecological change
 as a result of climatic and other factors,
 who can build up invaluable records.
 There are hundreds of thousands of millions
 of home computers giving statistical analysis power.
 Previously, the preservers, big institutions
 with big mainframe computers,
 making this kind of sophisticated mathematical analysis
 available to almost anyone.
 There are hundreds of thousands of science graduates
 with a training in the professional background,
 not working as professional researchers
 who could contribute to this.
 And there are already areas where almost all the research
 that goes on is in fact amateur.
 These are some, in addition,
 there's the whole realm of psychedelic experience
 where professional research is very limited in scope,
 but amateur research has accumulated
 a wealth of knowledge and experience.
 There are amateur computer experts
 who have developed an enormous amount of experience.
 And I think that this base that already exists,
 the present almost completely disregarded
 by institutional science,
 provides the basis already in place,
 costing governments nothing, requiring no external funding,
 from which a new kind of grassroots science could arise.
 One way would be through extension of existing networks,
 possible building up of regional research networks.
 And the way I'd see it developing
 is that this other kind of science
 would not be seen as a rival to existing science,
 but in the end, this could all be complementary
 to the professional science, the scientific establishment,
 and these two systems could cross-fertilize
 and influence each other.
 Whereas now they proceed as if they're,
 as if the other one hardly exists.
 So that's my idea about the possibility
 of a new kind of science.
 - Well, that sounds wonderful and very promising.
 And if this could simply happen as you've described it,
 then the decline of science could be reversed.
 Clever young people could be attracted
 more and better information,
 and understanding could be developed and so on.
 And I certainly think that's desirable,
 although I share with many ordinary people
 the decline of competence in science
 for the reasons you've described.
 The acceptance of a new model of science,
 of grassroot science, of major developments,
 unless they're given birth by amateur groups and so on,
 the acceptance of all this by the scientific establishment
 seems very unlikely somehow.
 The population of the scientific establishment
 would have to be totally swapped out
 with new young people coming in
 who had grown up in these new style groups.
 And of course, that's a possibility.
 I'm worried though about how, I mean,
 this would have to evolve through a series of developments
 difficult to envision at this time.
 But I see a problem in the communication,
 the extension of the networks,
 and the sharing of the results,
 and the replacement of the function
 of big science provided by publication in journals
 with peer review and so on.
 I hate the peer review process,
 but somehow the very growth of population,
 the growth of civilization,
 the growth of the scientific establishment
 means there's this immense amount of data
 that if it's not shared or made available
 or archived in libraries or something,
 nobody can access it,
 then it fails to achieve the goal of these discoveries.
 That's the problem.
 So I think the key to this development of a new model
 would be the development of a new model
 of a communication system
 for sharing the results of research.
 Will be necessary, it won't be possible
 for each group of pigeon fence-hearers
 in South Burlington, Vermont or something
 to have a journal newsletter or something like that,
 a regional newsletter.
 That would be too many newsletters to read.
 So I think the secret key
 to empower the success of this new development
 is the communications aspect of the computer revolution,
 the bulletin boards, the computer networks,
 and developments not yet really vision
 for the archiving and sharing of this kind of information
 in central electronic libraries.
 That would be the key.
 And until everyone could have,
 could access the results of this research
 and easily sort of survey all what had been done
 in a certain area and find out about these new hybrids
 and so on,
 that the dream couldn't really become a reality.
 Maybe it requires further development
 in the archiving and sharing of electronic information
 in order to make this possible.
 How will the regional networks be organized
 and communicate with each other?
 It could be that the lack of a successful means
 of communication that way is the very reason
 that these big laboratories and big science
 have actually evolved.
 The governments have sensed, they have tried,
 they've experimented and they've proved to their own satisfaction
 that the investment of the bucks in a big laboratory
 gives a bigger bang than in granting smaller sums
 to a large number of small laboratories.
 Certainly these groups will need grants,
 they'll need some support.
 You have to have some equipment.
 Inexpensive science still does cost, right?
 Well, I mean, the thing is that if you take, say, pigeon fanciers,
 they already have journals, Pigeon Racing Weekly and so on,
 and there are several in England on newsstands.
 They already have newsletters.
 None of them get grants.
 They buy their own pigeons, race them, maintain them, breed them.
 There's a system of competitions or prizes
 for successful winners of races,
 but the whole thing is completely self-financing.
 Now, the idea I had in mind was,
 in cooperation with these different communities of researchers
 or practitioners who already exist,
 one would pose certain questions like,
 how do racing pigeons home?
 Now, I have my own ideas about how this could be tested.
 For example, by moving the loft from the pigeons,
 seeing if they can find the loft.
 This is one of the experiments in the book I'm writing.
 Well, this kind of question, when formulated,
 put out there in the Racing Pigeon press
 and in the existing newsletters,
 might engage a certain number of people
 in wanting to do these experiments.
 The results will be fed in through these existing networks
 of information to others,
 and there'll be a debate and other people perhaps take part,
 and the whole of this community could be engaged
 in certain kinds of research projects.
 Now, in relation to, say, amateur naturalists,
 a project that I'm trying to get going in London,
 where I live, in Hampstead,
 is that on Hampstead Heath,
 there's several species of trees
 that are showing very advanced signs of dieback or actual death.
 The London Plain tree is dying off all over London,
 which will totally affect the appearance of the city.
 Willow trees are in a bad way.
 Acacias are in a very bad way.
 Some species are not quite so bad.
 And opinions, most people have hardly noticed,
 but those who have noticed have different opinions
 as to why this is so.
 We've had two or three years of drought.
 There are certain fungus diseases around.
 There's an enormous increase in ozone and atmospheric pollution
 due to increased car traffic in London, photochemical smogs.
 And which of these are affecting it?
 And as the greenhouse effect begins to bite,
 as the temperature changes,
 what kinds of changes will occur in forest ecosystems?
 There's nobody keeping records.
 The Heath authorities are busy rushing around,
 mending the drains and sort of clearing the rubbish.
 The preservation societies are busy trying to stop people
 cutting things down and spoiling the Heath
 by building new police radio towers on it
 and that kind of thing.
 But there's nobody at present
 keeping a year-by-year record of what's happening.
 So, posing the questions is part of it.
 And if amateur naturalist groups had clearly posed questions,
 like, is there a year-by-year change
 in the bird population, the tree population,
 which trees are suffering, which ones are doing better?
 We would have an enormous database
 gathered from different parts of the world,
 which would be of practical value, for example,
 in what do you do about global climate change
 if the greenhouse effect is really happening,
 which it seems to be,
 if the climate of Britain gets warmer and drier, for example,
 what kinds of trees should be planted on Hempstead Heath now
 so that in 50 or 100 years' time,
 well within the lifetime of the tree planted today,
 there's a reasonable chance of them surviving
 rather than the whole place being an ecological disaster zone?
 And this is a very small...
 I mean, I take this because it's a very small example,
 but there's a much bigger question.
 What kind of crops would grow and change in climate?
 What changes occur in existing forests and existing ecosystems?
 So it's not just a matter of enormous accumulation of data
 without any kind of...
 That's happening already.
 These amateur groups build up enormous databanks,
 which they share through networks and newsletters already in place.
 But for a larger picture and for the asking of specific questions,
 there could be a system whereby these questions
 are fed through these local networks
 or formulated with the help of people within them.
 And there could be a vastly greater research effort
 going on than there is now.
 And I don't think it would necessarily require
 a big change in the present system.
 Some of them, I'm sure, are using computer networks already.
 Others have existing systems of information exchange
 like newspapers, journals, commercially produced magazines,
 the rabbit fence here.
 You know, there's all these things.
 Incredible number of specialized journals are actually published
 and are self-sustaining financially.
 So I think it's partly a question of formulating questions
 that are of a wider interest than the nuts and bolts questions
 asked within these existing groups
 or within groups that could come into being.
 And something that moves into a larger picture.
 And that, I think, is the way that the research could be coordinated somehow
 through particular kinds of questions.
 Yes, well, if interesting questions came along from a central authority
 or an interesting amateur, for example, your book,
 your forthcoming book,
 and this captured the attention, the imagination of groups worldwide,
 and then they accumulated their data pertinent to the question
 in the standard form readable by other groups and so on,
 then a bigger picture, regional or global picture of certain phenomena
 like the death of plane trees could be developed.
 But it might need, in order to synthesize all this information,
 a really large map, a computer graphic display
 or something that would be two steps beyond the budget of these small groups.
 Maybe there would be a secondary network
 where the primary pigeon pens use.
 And so when doing research with how many pigeons in a moving home,
 they would create their primary data stimulated by a certain question.
 And then the secondary groups would access the data from other centers
 and other countries and other continents and so on,
 try to test certain hypotheses about the rate of advance,
 the strength of the morphogenetic field,
 the distant effect, the speed of the effect, and so on.
 Probably for all this to happen, it would require a substantial motivation
 because these amateur groups have habits.
 Their habits of their 19th century groups,
 their survival of the grassroots science of the past,
 and then some kind of broadcasting of their results to central labs
 or secondary research groups trying to develop a larger picture,
 a global picture that's not part of their habit.
 So to make this transformation from their habit to a new mode
 would require some kind of compelling motivation.
 And I think that this mention of global environmental problems
 is touching on what may very well be the powerful motivation that
 would incline these groups to attain to a higher level of cooperativity
 among themselves on a global scale.
 That's really what's needed is increasing the connectivity
 between these groups as in a neural net,
 you increase the connectivity and then global patterns form.
 So I think in the context of this idea that bad news is good news,
 that the rapidly approaching environmental problems,
 I'm personally worried more about global cooling than global warming.
 But in any case, a global change is going to simulate a global response, I think.
 And that might be the way in which the revival of grassroots science
 takes its strongest motivation.
 What do you think, Terry?
 Well, I'm as interested in the next person as in the reform of big science.
 My-- the way I would choose to react to Rupert's statement
 is rather than see it as actually a practical plan for the reform of science,
 to see it more as a proposal that can serve to show us
 what's wrong with science and how far off the track we've come.
 My questions would address four areas which all arise, I think,
 from the same problem that I see with it.
 First of all, instrumentality.
 The grassroots science, you called it 19th century, Ralph,
 grassroots science can be done with rather tangible problems.
 But if you're interested in the neutrino output of the sun,
 or something like this, instrumentalities of great cost are necessary.
 And I think that science has not only moved from the easy problems
 to the hard problems in its evolution over the past thousand years,
 it's also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems,
 and that it is now wedded to instrumentalities of such size and cost
 that even nations seem to need to band together.
 For instance, the Super Collider Project,
 or the proposed joint Soviet-Mars expedition,
 I don't think there's any way for grassroots science
 to finance and execute an expedition to Mars.
 So I've made three areas of concern.
 Instrumentality, meaning scientific instruments of great cost.
 Technology, the fact that science is the handmaiden of advanced product research,
 is what has given it such overwhelming sway over most of our lives.
 Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature.
 Science is done to make money on a vast scale.
 And I dare say no funding would be forthcoming
 if there was no anticipated payback from that funding.
 So then that leads to capitalism.
 What is its role in the promotion of big science over small science?
 And how can the impulse to do pure science in the Greek style
 or the grassroots style somehow be unlocked
 from the demands of capitalism which distort that impulse
 so that we may spend hundreds of millions of dollars
 discovering whether certain chemicals that will go into a facial soap
 are allergenic or not,
 but we wouldn't allocate $100,000 to study a very basic and interesting question
 like how the pigeon is home.
 And then fourthly, and along the same continuum,
 science has been appropriated by the military-industrial complex.
 And again, this would be very hard to see how it could be disentangled from that.
 So I see your proposal as not so much a proposal for the reform of science,
 but for the creation of a kind of parallel institution.
 We could almost call it the people's science or science, hands-on science.
 How, and I'd just like to hear you address all these things,
 and I'm all for the idea,
 but I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse
 to understand the natural world around us
 into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology,
 enormous instruments, and the military-industrial complex,
 and that I've probably named some of the most overwhelming
 and monolithic forces in our society.
 How can we rescue dame science from the hands of such intractable foes
 of the Greek and original impulse
 to simply understand and appreciate the natural world?
 Well, I think part of the answer comes from the shift in paradigm
 which is happening for a variety of reasons, independent, well, not independent,
 but seemingly independent of these political and economic ones,
 namely the move towards a more holistic model of science.
 And as I said earlier, the holistic research where you look at whole systems
 is much cheaper than analytical research where you look at smaller systems.
 You see, atomism, which is the philosophy that underlies reductionism,
 puts the greatest emphasis on the smallest possible things.
 Hence, the highest prestige attaches to superconducting superconductors,
 which are the biggest pieces of apparatus you can make,
 because the smaller the thing, the bigger the apparatus.
 Now, if we, as we are doing, undergo a shift of model,
 so that kind of science seems somewhat less interesting,
 then the emphasis would become on studying the properties of molecules,
 of crystals, at their own level, of cells, of organisms, of ecosystems.
 That kind of science requiring enormous increase in instrumentation,
 which goes together with a reductionistic approach,
 would simply become less important, less relevant, less attractive.
 And that would in itself help to take care of the instrumental problem.
 You can see the same thing in medicine.
 If you have a medical research system that we've got now,
 entirely in the service of mechanistic medicine,
 then the emphasis goes on new methods of biochemical diagnosis,
 you know, genetic engineering, diagnostic aids, high-tech scanning equipment, and so on.
 And no research money at all, in most countries,
 goes into looking at the effects of other holistic methods,
 which more of which mean well flourish in,
 even in small towns around the Western world.
 All the different kinds of holistic approaches that go on.
 There's not really much effort to compare these approaches,
 to see which works better than others.
 There are a few small-scale projects,
 but it's clear that the economics of the medical system,
 which at present, are escalating costs,
 which mean the cost of insurance,
 or the cost of socialized medicine,
 and countries with it, like Britain,
 are constantly spiraling upwards,
 and provoking a whole crisis in the health care system.
 Now, for political reasons alone, in Britain,
 there's an increasing willingness of, for economic reasons really,
 of politicians to consider the possibility of holistic medicine,
 simply because it's cheaper.
 And if you can cut down on the costs of heart transfers,
 expensive scans, and that kind of thing,
 by people doing more meditation,
 taking a few homeopathic pills, and that kind of thing,
 have acupuncture,
 this kind of thing could lead to far cheaper medical insurance.
 It could lead to a much cheaper and more comprehensive health service
 in countries that have comprehensive health services.
 And it would lead to a completely different kind of medical research.
 I mean, how, in this context,
 which would be very relevant to medical insurance companies,
 which already, in some cases,
 insure people with chiropractors, osteopaths, acupunctures, and so on.
 One way of going about this, on the grassroots method,
 I've suggested, would be simply a survey method.
 A systematic survey carried out by students or local communities,
 going around asking people what diseases they've had,
 how they think they've been cured,
 and how they rate the effectiveness of the different systems they've had.
 This is, in fact, the word-of-mouth method,
 how one gets to know about things like acupuncture.
 You hear somebody said something,
 they say it's been cured by acupuncture,
 you go to them, someone's got a bad back,
 it's a chiropractor that cures it,
 not going into an advanced surgical board.
 In some cases that works, but for most people,
 these systems, which are outside the purview of orthodox medicine and the AMA,
 are what work, and you hear about them by word of mouth.
 A more systematic approach, you see,
 would be systematically to survey people's experience.
 You have like a consumer report on these systems,
 and this could be done at any level of sophistication or depth.
 And if it worked in the West, then you could extend it to India,
 where these different systems, Ayurvedic,
 the Unani system of the Muslims,
 the homeopathic system, the Western system,
 traditional forms of spiritual healing, all co-exist.
 And every Indian I talked to when I was living there
 had quite clear ideas about which one worked for which.
 For jaundice, you wouldn't go to a Western doctor
 because they were hopeless.
 You'd go to an Ayurvedic or a Hakim, a Unani Hakim,
 because they had good cures for jaundice.
 For acute illnesses, you'd go to Western doctors and get antibiotics.
 For skin, long-term chronic skin complaints, you'd go to homeopaths.
 For mental diseases, you'd go to temples
 or to some kind of faith healing thing in a Dargah, a Muslim shrine.
 There's a wealth of knowledge there,
 which is nowhere codified, nowhere investigated,
 as part of an ongoing, continuously modified oral tradition.
 And so, in the realm of medical research, too,
 I think this method could be applied quite cheaply and simply without instruments.
 It would, in fact, give one a method of estimating
 the effectiveness of instruments through high-tech medicine.
 So I think that as soon as you begin to look holistically at things,
 the need for large instruments disappears.
 And it may be that, if we think differently,
 about the need for missions to Mars, the need for Star Wars,
 the need for the Human Genome Project,
 and the need for large-scale nuclear physics projects
 in this new context may seem much less important.
 And hence, the process you talked about,
 the need for these instrumentation, it would get less.
 Then, when it comes to the power of capitalism,
 the military-industrial complex,
 again, the power of these things are changing.
 The interests of health insurance companies
 and the interests of national health systems
 are not working in favor, necessarily, of ever more expensive medicine.
 There are political forces working in different directions.
 With the end of the Cold War,
 the need for vast, high-tech military spending projects
 is going to become harder to defend politically.
 And so, I think that the situation is changing quite rapidly
 in all these respects.
 Well, what you seem to be advocating is the collection,
 correlation, and study of data
 as something which doesn't cost a lot of money
 and which can be done on home computers
 and transferred among self-organized networks of people.
 And I agree that probably the forward rush of big science
 has ignored a lot of areas.
 But there are...
 I mean, what do you say to the extraterrestrial planetologists
 or to the astrophysicists or to the molecular biologists?
 It seems there are large areas of science
 which have become so wedded to the need for instrumentalities
 of great cost that there is no way to do them
 without vast research programs
 and enormously expensive instruments.
 So, what you're really focusing on, I think,
 is not so much a downsizing of science
 as a refocusing of it on the biological, medical,
 and sociological domain as opposed to...
 Highly warranted.
 Highly warranted.
 But can this be done?
 I mean, it's extreme, the inertia of the other forms of science
 to tell the physicists that the exploration of matter will be halted,
 to tell the astrophysicists that the exploration of the galaxy
 will be halted,
 to tell the oceanographers that the exploration of the deep sea will be halted,
 is not entirely in the service of the original Greek impulse
 to understand nature.
 They're going to be told that anyway.
 They are being told already in Britain.
 I mean, nuclear physics has been shut down.
 There's a logic crisis.
 Even if popular support remained tremendous for subnuclear particle research,
 the budget crisis would make it impossible to continue in that line,
 even if everybody wanted to.
 Meanwhile, we have new crises.
 You see, this nuclear physics was a response to urgent need
 in the military-industrial complex, as you pointed out.
 They needed this defense against aggression and so on.
 Now we have a new problem,
 and the defense departments of the various nations
 are going to have to do about-face
 and reorient themselves toward the real enemy now.
 Well, when you were talking, for instance,
 about gathering and integrating temperatures
 or climatological data on the die-off of trees in Britain,
 it occurred to me recently there's been a debate
 in the scientific community saying
 that all ground-based temperature observations
 have to be thrown out of the model
 because only if you look down from space on an environment
 do you actually get data which is not contaminated by local effects.
 So in some cases, it seems,
 there's going to have to be a continued reliance on...
 All right.
 We acknowledge that big science is going to continue to exist,
 but it's got to, first of all, economize.
 Secondly, reorient itself toward real problems,
 not only to maintain popular support,
 to maintain any support,
 maintain any population of scientists to do it.
 And thirdly, it's got to reintegrate with grassroots science
 because of economies
 and also because the information on that level is needed.
 I think that the new model for big science
 is going to be data banks
 together with scientific visualization strategies
 based on computer graphics,
 which, as you correctly implied, is expensive.
 The mission to planet Earth,
 the NASA proposal to monitor the temperature everywhere from satellites,
 will actually be very inexpensive
 compared to ground-based methods of collecting the same data.
 The problem is how to visualize it.
 And there we see groups working at the national laboratory level
 with enormous supercomputers that are really expensive,
 trying to devise ways to synthesize all this data
 and sort of get the picture.
 So I think the new challenge for big science will be
 they'll still have maybe more moderate budgets,
 but they will have to be focused in big laboratories
 with big supercomputers and with huge disks
 holding all this accumulated data.
 And the mission to planet Earth
 will be broadcasting down from these satellites
 terabytes, terabytes per minute,
 of information that has to go somewhere.
 And until that's figured out, which will be expensive,
 we can't have any...
 I don't think we'll really get the benefit from all this grassroots science,
 either what exists today or what would be developed in the future
 in response to some really exciting new questions
 proposed from a larger view of global planetary behavior.
 Certainly, the physical sciences have had
 more than their share of the national budgets for science.
 And as Rupert pointed out at the beginning,
 the growing tendency of biological science
 to imitate this bad strategy of the physical scientists
 in putting all their eggs in one basket with giant machines
 and fewer laboratories and journals and so on.
 This is a bad direction because it's dead-end street.
 This actually represents the devolution of science
 led at the most rapid possible rate by the physical scientists,
 these guys with their huge telescopes and so on.
 The piece of the budget pie for science is shrinking.
 Even if it didn't, it would have to be reorganized
 so that a fair share went to medical, biological,
 and also social and environmental sciences.
 Then everyone's budget is still going to be too small.
 And to get the largest result from the fixed budget
 I still think it'll be necessary to have some big science,
 big lab centers where the synthesis of all the information
 will be the largest problem of science in the future
 is just to manage this enormous database.
 And the fact that the physical scientists have got
 their unjustified piece of the pie so far is, I think,
 because within their big budgets, which still aren't infinite,
 they've been able to produce a result
 because they don't have to deal with databanks that are unmanageable size.
 They're studying simple systems and within their budget
 they've been able to deliver a product,
 something that can be adapted by a business
 for new high-tech commodities, gadgets,
 and consumers.
 Well, maybe we should think of it as establishing
 a sort of parallel track of re-humanized science,
 but retain things like the Human Genome Project,
 which promises a much deeper understanding of human disease
 and genetic defects and this sort of thing.
 The other thing is institutions expect a payoff
 on the investment they make in the people they train,
 and somehow they are going to have to be talked out of this payback
 because big science has been the tent
 under which product development and that sort of thing has gone on,
 which has then led to the payback into the universities
 so that these laboratories could be endowed
 and so forth and so on.
 It's very hard to see how in the small science model
 it closes the loop and pays its own way.
 It has more the quality of the English squire or naturalist
 who carries out observations in his local area
 that are very interesting,
 but that only his private wealth allows him the luxury of doing this
 How will it support itself?
 How will it be other than something in the hands of hobbyists and dilettantes?
 Well, there are two things that could happen there.
 One is that, well, already amateurs do these things on quite a large scale.
 Pigeon fanciers, of whom there are about 500,000 in Britain,
 are mostly working class and some of them are on social security.
 The one I've worked with most closely can't work.
 He's got a disease. He's on social security.
 It's so cheap that you can do it on that level.
 This isn't just the province of squires.
 Maybe orchid growing is, if you need greenhouses.
 But there are certain kinds of things which we live in
 a far more prosperous society than ever before.
 So this kind of expenditure of your own money on what you really like is widely available.
 Many, many people take advantage of it.
 Even if it's only at the level of gardening.
 And it's one of the most popular of all hobbies.
 People don't need grants to buy plants for their garden
 and they wouldn't need grants to graft different ones together
 or to breed different ones by crossing them.
 We're using a camel hair brush to transfer the pollen from one to another.
 So plant breeding and things are so low budget
 they're actually within the capacity of hundreds of thousands of even millions of people already.
 When it comes to the need for additional funding for data banks
 for things where you do need other things
 I think that there could be a new system of...
 They could be regional research councils.
 They could be... I mean there's various structures you can think of
 where a tiny fraction, 1%, 0.1% of existing science budgets
 were put in funding this grassroots science.
 Together with a series of competitions
 I in fact suggested one to the editor of Nature
 when he told me about this increasing complexity and cost of research as the tendency.
 I said well why not offer a $10,000 prize every year
 the Nature Prize for the best research conducted on a budget of less than £1,000.
 And he said there's no point because no one would enter for it.
 And I said I would.
 And he said well then I don't think we'll offer the prize.
 [laughter]
 But the possibility you see of...
 I've found in my own experience that prizes act as quite a strong motivation for people.
 In morphic resonance research the most recent competition
 results have just been announced for student projects
 there was a $5,000 prize to be shared between three people worldwide.
 This motivated some very interesting research.
 And so a tiny fraction of existing science or education budgets
 devoted to funding this grassroots network
 would be politically popular because it would be far more politically popular
 than the 99% devoted to big science and existing projects
 because it would touch far more people and give more visible results.
 And because the kind of budgets we're talking about are so small
 a little amount of money would go a very long way.
 So I'm not saying it wouldn't need funding
 but the amount of funding would be so small compared with existing science budgets
 you'd hardly notice it, this deflection of a tiny percentage of existing budgets in this direction.
 Yes, that's right.
 Well don't you think though that the public support for science is based on the fact that
 science is based on the expectation that it will usher in new technologies
 which the mass of people have a great faith that these new technologies
 will then deliver them into a somehow better world.
 And if you break that chain of expectations and say
 no, well we're now going to do science in such a way that you can forget about new technologies
 that the interest in science will decline to the level of the interest in support of
 a term like "go" or something.
 No, no, no, just think of the old model.
 We're talking about the revolution of science in the context of a major paradigm shift
 in which it would be but one component.
 And one of the things we're anticipating in the future
 are these global environmental problems, they're already here.
 So people I think in the future are going to expect from science, from government, from
 religion, from themselves the salvation from these serious problems.
 Just as now for medical science they want the cure of cancer and AIDS.
 Solutions.
 They want a solution, they don't want products.
 No, but they want solutions.
 Solutions.
 And in order for this to be forthcoming for the grassroots science, well for a science
 project to participate in the solution of these problems, I think it wouldn't suffice
 to develop a new and parallel scientific establishment living on its own and doing its best work
 on a low budget or something.
 We would want to integrate that with the new model for society which would be emerging
 in order to, you know, under the pressure of, the evolutionary pressure of environmental
 problems.
 That means that the new science, grassroots science, would have to link up in an effective
 way with journals, with glossy magazines like Scientific American and so on, presenting
 the progress that they do make toward solutions of major problems.
 Alongside the results of the big laboratories and everybody else.
 It's not enough to offer competitions and prizes.
 You must also offer the possibility of publication, access to the publication which can garner
 the public support that nourishes amateur as well as professional scientists.
 Well, take as a test case, and it's also a very real dilemma, the depletion of the ozone
 hole.
 To even study this requires the cooperation of air forces, massive data acquisition and
 analysis facilities.
 And when you move from studying it to doing something about it, it may take a significant
 portion of every dollar the rest of, we all make for the rest of our lives.
 And the fate of the planet may hang in the balance.
 Now how can a grassroots science make a contribution to that?
 Because the ozone hole was first observed in a federal laboratory which had collected
 data that it neglected to study.
 So when amateur scientists would have had, if amateur scientists would have had access
 to the data sitting in this archive, then they might, and anyone with that access, might
 have made the discovery of the ozone hole.
 In fact, the person who discovered it was the person who collected the data, but it
 was several years later.
 Also, the ozone hole was originally thought to be totally isolated over the poles.
 But now they've discovered this vortex mixing, that the ozone holes are gradually sucking
 ozone from the temperate regions.
 So if amateur scientists had ozone observers, which are little telescopes, simple device,
 look straight up, measure the ozone density over their own home, then it's just like the
 pine trees, the rate at which the ozone depletion is diffusing over the population centuries
 would then be observed by amateur scientists, where it might very well be overlooked by
 the large laboratories that exclusively devote their research to these high-flying U2s that
 go over the polar regions.
 And to do something about it?
 I could envision a new model in which big science existed as it is today on a lower
 budget, grassroots science existed as it does today on a larger budget, and the two are
 coupled together much more tightly through information sharing mechanisms.
 The National Science Foundation, for example, in the United States might have as its main
 mission the storage and provision of access to this enormous data so that people can come
 with a new hypothesis, a new question, a small competition, stimulating high school students
 who could then actually obtain the data that no one is looking at about the ozone depletion
 or something else, and win the prize by making a phenomenal new discovery of data which may
 be sitting around and has been provided by some very expensive instrument.
 That's the combination.
 So it seems to be, we keep returning to this thing, that the big science provides the data
 or the data is accessible by non-expensive local means, but somehow the problem is to
 acquire the data.
 And for many, many problems, I mean, I mentioned the ozone hole, we could also talk about the
 danger of planetesimal impact on the Earth, things like, or analyzing the effect of the
 Philippine volcanic eruption, somehow the acquisition of this data sounds like it's
 going to keep big science in business for a while.
 And I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified
 scientific data.
 That's an obscene concept.
 But I wonder if at least at this stage in the technological revolution, a Mac 2 is sufficient
 to deal with the data collected.
 Perhaps it is.
 But if not, then the small scientist remains at a disadvantage because number crunching
 is a part of the analysis of the huge data stream that is coming in.
 Maybe the answer is to concentrate on dropping the cost of supercomputing.
 Well, that's happening.
 But that would require an enormous governmental project costing billions of dollars and so
 forth and so on.
 The very thing we're trying to get away from here.
 I think the computer revolution is actually the answer to the main problem.
 The prices are spontaneously dropping.
 Supercomputer on the desk, the personal supercomputer is a reality today.
 It'll be cheaper tomorrow, the Mac 3, the Mac 4, and so on.
 Let's take that for granted.
 I still think...
 But it will be brought to us by Apple Corporation, one of the largest corporate entities in the
 American capitalist mix.
 It won't be done by two guys in a garage.
 That era is gone forever.
 Well, I mean, you're now concentrating on these huge, like the ozone hole problem.
 And how can you apply it?
 First of all, how the ozone hole, what do you do about it?
 A lot more was done about that, in Britain at least, by amateur groups like Greenpeace
 and Friends of the Earth, you know, people protesting to corporations about canisters
 of this, and protests about fridge recycling.
 These things, they gather data.
 They don't need huge number crunchers.
 You need fairly simple data to turn doing something right into political action through
 existing pressure groups.
 Secondly, the question of...
 Well, no, just leave it at that for the moment about the ozone hole.
 The second question about information gathering, there isn't, in fact, a glut of information
 in some areas.
 There's a great shortage.
 Friends of the Earth also collect samples downstream from industrial farms in rivers
 and from drinking water supplies and find that in 30% of Britain, they exceed the nitrate
 levels permitted by British and EEC regulations.
 Pesticide residue levels are far too high, etc.
 Data which, if it's collected at all by our government, is kept secret, and which, when
 revealed and published, requiring no great sophistication of laboratories, no enormous
 number crunchers, can lead to enormous political knock-on effects, questions in parliament,
 letters in newspapers, public protests, that can actually begin to do something about these
 things.
 So the environmental groups have already used fairly simple analytical techniques, fairly
 simple data processing methods to great effect.
 So the ozone hole is, you know, that's why I don't deny there's a problem at that level,
 but there are problems at much lower levels where an enormous, hopefully greater amount
 can be done by amateur data collection without vast number crunchers, and where the translation
 into political effect, doing something about it, are much sooner and quicker than to solving
 enormous global climate problems.
 Well, so I think we're left with the conclusion that there has to be a parallelism, that somehow
 there's room for both of these approaches, that they address different areas of concern,
 and that when they can make common cause, that's all well and good, but that they are
 really directed toward, in most cases, different ends.
 Well, not necessarily, you see, because coming back to an earlier point, where you said that
 what people want in science is something that gives a product, or something useful, or some
 public good, that's not really always true in some cases, but think of the things that
 are some of the most popular things in the whole of science that interest even three-year-olds,
 namely dinosaurs.
 Science museums draw millions of people to them if they put on displays of dinosaurs.
 Stephen Jay Gould sells millions of copies of his books, which are about things like
 dinosaurs, extinctions, and so on.
 The only form of popular science that interests Merlin, age three, is dinosaurs.
 He goes to halls of science to see dinosaurs.
 And so the interesting thing is that there's a kind of science here which has an enormous
 grassroots base, which has nothing to do with, say, the world.
 A major paleontological project has the character of a major dam building or excavation project.
 I mean, it costs millions to--
 Most of these bones were collected in the last century by amateurs for virtually nothing.
 And while it may cost millions to build these huge plastic models that emit roaring noises
 and are engineered to sort of grow--
 Well, I'm talking about sinking a fossil shaft somewhere in the Gobi Desert and extracting,
 in a proper scientific manner, the fossils therein over two years requires maintaining
 hundreds of people in the field from staff scientists down to coolies and the air transport--
 On a pay of about 50 cents a day.
 And the air transport of hundreds of tons of rock back to--
 It doesn't have to be air transport.
 I mean, paleontology was already a well-established science in the 19th century on incredibly low
 budgets, mostly funded by amateurs.
 It's a wonderful example of low-cost grassroots science.
 Well, amateurs like Baron Guy de Rothschild and--
 But many others.
 There were many amateurs who have played a part in the development of paleontology,
 and it's one of the most low-cost areas of science.
 And it's one with one of the highest public appeals.
 So--
 Well, I don't have that great a familiarity with paleontology, but I think the--
 I do know something about archaeology, and it costs a fortune, archaeology, to do it right.
 Well, a lot of expeditions were done on a very low budget.
 For example, when Flinders Peak Reefers went to--
 But I'm talking about today, when you go into Guatemala or the Yucatan to excavate a Mayan site
 to keep a team in the rainforest for six months--
 Well, Rupert hasn't suggested to slash all budgets to zero, and presumably these
 relatively expensive projects will continue to be funded according to the degree that--
 by which they can gain public support.
 They provide exciting results, solve important problems, and so on.
 They could be funded.
 Simultaneously, they could be influenced enormously by discoveries of the Grassroots Science Group,
 feeding into the determination of how this budget is supposed to be spent.
 Well, we might stick with archaeology for a moment here, because it's an interesting science
 in that it doesn't generate new products, it doesn't give us a sense of progress,
 it doesn't feed into the military-industrial complex.
 It seems almost the model of what we're talking about,
 and yet it's absolutely famished for money for all those reasons,
 and finds it very difficult to obtain funding.
 An enormous amount of archaeology is funded by the patronage of wealthy enthusiasts,
 and it's not a happy experience to spend an evening with archaeologists
 listening to them discuss the difficulties they're having funding projects that they are,
 in a few minutes, able to convince you are very, very worthy and interesting.
 Archaeology is almost the paradigm of the small science enterprise that we're talking about,
 and yet it seems beset with difficulties that may show us
 problems that we can anticipate if we try to expand this model.
 Well, I mean, at the moment the archaeology budget, I'm sure,
 is a tiny fraction of the 1% of the budget spent on the genome project Star Wars.
 We're talking, the global archaeology budget must be, what, 10 million, 20 million, at most?
 Something like that.
 50 million dollars, I should imagine.
 I should be as surprised if it's more than that.
 And this is absolutely peanuts.
 And many people say it is an amateur science.
 That it is an amateur science.
 A lot of it is an amateur science, and then it's got this professional end,
 where they have to raise funding often from private concerns and so on, or wealthy donors.
 It is an amateur science.
 It has a large grassroots component even today.
 You know, people who excavate in an amateur manner.
 There are Anglo-Saxon excavations going on in Britain, for example,
 using students and the vacations, amateurs and so on,
 with very minimal central funding from the government.
 So archaeology is actually a case in point.
 It's the model.
 You've got a large grassroots base, a large grassroots popular interest,
 museums which can attract lots of people to see these things.
 And even the biggest projects are relatively cheap compared with large-scale science.
 What's happening now, you see, is that what this discussion is proposing is not that
 a hundred percent of available funding should go to grassroots science
 and zero to existing institutional science,
 but rather to change the present situation where a hundred percent goes to existing institutional science
 and zero percent to the more grassroots mode.
 A shift in balance from 99 percent to institutional science
 and one percent to grassroots science would totally turn around the situation,
 change the popular base of science, its popular appeal,
 and I think bring a whole new vigor and a whole new spirit into this scientific endeavor.
 One further thing, which is your particular realm of expertise,
 psychedelic research seems to me a very important component of consciousness research.
 We hear a lot about the need for consciousness research.
 We know so little about the human mind.
 A lot of funding goes into cognitive psychology,
 particularly if it involves computer models,
 because it could feed into new generations of computer.
 That's why the funding goes into that area.
 Relatively low funding goes into psychological research that's to do with psychotherapy,
 because that's most of the province of practicing psychotherapists
 who are self-funding or rather who are funded by the people that go to see them.
 A certain amount goes into official psychiatric and drug research to do with centrally active drugs,
 but the vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999 percent at least,
 which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree,
 about the nature of consciousness, the range of the imagination,
 the powers of the human mind, etc., is not funded at all by official agencies.
 In fact, every effort is made to suppress it.
 In spite of official discouragement and suppression,
 where hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in trying to stop it happening
 rather than encourage it, it actually goes on.
 There's a wealth of experience built up about human consciousness,
 which is relevant to the larger question of the nature of our minds,
 their relation to our bodies, the relation of consciousness to the biochemical level.
 Things which are perfectly compatible with a lot of mainstream concerns
 and certainly of enormous interest in trying to get a better understanding
 of the world we live in and of ourselves.
 Here's an area where, for legal and other reasons,
 virtually the whole of the research effort is in the amateur domain
 and virtually the whole of it is negatively funded
 rather than by the public domain,
 in the sense that funds are spent trying to stop it.
 Here's an area where there's the possibility of networks
 and of coordinated questions being asked,
 which could be of enormous value starting today,
 because there's not much prospect of this research being taken up officially.
 Yet, I would have thought, the formulation of appropriate questions
 could lead to very interesting research being undertaken
 by explorers of the psychedelic realm.
 Yes, I quite agree.
 I mean, this would be an obvious area where the simple codification
 and making available of data would have a tremendous impact
 on the models being developed within the field.
 Here's a related area as astrology, or the so-called pseudosciences,
 all together.
 These are not going to be funded any other way
 than by amateur groups, I suppose.
 I think that if the means existed for sharing the information
 that already is known to result in various experiments...
 So, do you need to get out?
 ...that a new pseudoscience with the regular sciences would result.
 For example, if people had a computer program
 that displayed when they woke up each morning
 their natal chart and the positions of the current planets,
 noted any transients of the daily planets
 over the sensitive points on their natal chart,
 and tried to correlate that with, for example,
 diseases, psychological states, and so on,
 then this tremendous amount of information coming
 to thousands of people who do believe in astrology
 could be available for high school researchers and so on,
 testing hypotheses posed from some other areas,
 such as archaeology, paleontology,
 and big science of planetary astronomy, for example,
 about the possible impact of planetesimals and so on.
 All of this could be synthesized easily
 using computer network technology
 according to some wild hypothesis
 that came in from some clever high school science teacher.
 So, the psychedelic research, pseudosciences,
 other things that are totally rejected by society,
 would have cracks in the structure
 through which they could re-emerge back into the mainstream
 and making their contribution
 toward the solution of our global problems.
 Yes, human sexuality would be another area
 where data is not gathered
 because of institutional biases
 that are conscious or unconscious,
 but that networks of amateurs could organize themselves.
 And this is probably largely how it's done anyway.
 It's probably one of the least organized areas
 of social research that exists.
 And yet it's central to our psychological health
 and our sense of equilibrium in the world.
 Nutrition is another.
 Yes, there's a wonderful example of nutrition
 because lots of people pay attention to what they eat.
 Official nutritional studies are on the whole pretty crass.
 I went into this when I was working in India
 looking at the simple question of protein requirements.
 It turned out that the whole of the global food strategy
 had been based on studies done
 using American college students as average people,
 you know, at the protein requirement,
 based on heavy consumption of hamburgers,
 something like 60 grams of protein a day.
 Well, this, as people widened the database,
 as people looked at what really happened in India to poor people,
 this has been lowered to about 20 grams a day.
 And yet the whole world food production strategy
 was distorted for two decades
 by this kind of nutritional study.
 Real nutritional research that looked into specialized areas
 like allergies and how to deal with them
 would have large number of volunteers
 bringing forth information.
 Research on people who can survive with incredibly little food
 would have enormous implications for the world food problem
 by showing that it may be possible
 not only to work on increasing the supply
 but reducing the demand.
 It may be possible, as some people practice doing,
 as part of spiritual disciplines or otherwise,
 to survive on incredibly small amounts.
 There's huge areas in nutritional research
 where there's a wealth of information
 that's totally untapped at the moment.
 The official nutritional journals
 are based on artificial experiments or nutritional surveys
 where people go around with clipboards
 or sit around observing people eating and noting what they're...
 and weighing them every week.
 We carried some out in India ourselves.
 Of a completely unrealistic kind.
 And yet nobody thought of going around and asking people
 what they thought about nutrition or...
 Well, let me turn the tape.
 Well, we'll have to catch up with them again next week
 and see what turns up when they turn the tape over.
 Although what we just heard was both sides of a cassette tape
 from that session that was simply labeled "Tape 1".
 And is it just me or did the fact that they didn't have an audience
 to entertain make this conversation fall a little flat
 or have a low energy level?
 Yet I hope you took away from this talk the fact that
 the possibility for grassroots science still does exist.
 Particularly in the psychedelic community
 where government-sanctioned research is extremely difficult to do,
 to say the least.
 And when you think about it,
 there really is no area of science
 that should be more deeply investigated
 than the vast area of human consciousness.
 And yet the most promising medicines in this field
 are all but ignored.
 To give you a little idea of what a grassroots scientist
 can contribute,
 I remember one week in Palenque many years ago
 when a large group of us tested a new psychoactive chemical
 for the first time.
 In all, I think there were probably a little over 40 of us
 who took it and our reactions were all over the place,
 everywhere from euphoria to one near-death experience
 when it was discovered that this particular substance
 doesn't mix with a certain prescription medicine.
 As it turned out, there was a budding young scientist among us
 who had the presence of mind to create and hand out a questionnaire
 about the experience.
 And I think most of us filled it out.
 And the result of this little impromptu survey,
 all anecdotal evidence,
 still remains like the only study,
 if you want to call it that, of this particular medicine.
 It isn't much, but it's all we have.
 I'll link to the online report of this experiment
 in the program notes for this podcast,
 which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
 So grassroots science can make a difference,
 even if it's just to alert someone who is using prescription medicines
 to avoid a psychoactive compound
 that big science hasn't yet had a chance to take a look at.
 In essence, the three of these amigos
 seem to be encouraging groups like Arrowid to come into existence,
 which Arrowid actually did some four years after this trial log was held.
 And it seems, after listening to the give and take
 between Rupert, Ralph, and Terrence just now,
 that maybe a good starting place would be for our community
 to continue to formulate scientific questions
 that grassroots research can use
 in an attempt to answer some of the larger questions
 that the big science people just aren't interested in.
 And I don't know what the answer is myself,
 but I'm sure that with all of the great minds
 we have here in the psychedelic community,
 that answers are probably already growing
 in various corners of cybernetic space,
 and connections being made, information exchanged,
 and the conscious evolution of consciousness
 is perhaps continuing at an ever-accelerating pace.
 Or at least that is something I hope is going on.
 And from the comments that have been posted on our blog,
 on the Psychedelic Salon forum,
 over on the growreport.com,
 I feel quite sure that the collective evolution
 of our species consciousness is on schedule and under budget.
 And yes, I'm aware that the Psychedelic Salon page
 over on MySpace has been deleted,
 but let's not get too carried away with ourselves here.
 You know, there were actually a lot of people
 trying to post some pretty unwanted comments on that page,
 and maybe one of them got through the approval process
 and posted one of their hateful messages there.
 It's quite conceivable if that happened
 that a bot would be looking for something like that
 and auto-delete the page.
 At least that's the way I want to leave it.
 And anyway, as some of the comments have pointed out,
 do we really want to put so much of our personal information
 into a database that's controlled by Rupert Murdoch?
 You know, I have to admit that
 if the system couldn't be tinkered with,
 it does have some really interesting potential.
 For instance, I did enjoy learning a little bit more
 about some of our fellow salonners,
 and I was still working my way through
 all of the great new music our friends had posted.
 So I'm sorry not to be able to do that anymore,
 but all in all, it's probably best that
 we opt out of MySpace and other databases.
 So for the time being,
 I'll be posting and reading comments and posts
 on our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog
 at psychedelicsalon.org,
 and over on our forum at thegirlreport.com
 and the other forums there too I also participate in.
 Now, since I control the first site
 and the Zandors control the other one,
 I feel confident that we'll be around both of them
 for quite a long time.
 Now, as for our schedule here in the salon
 for the rest of the year,
 I'm going to take a little time off at the end of the year,
 but there will be at least one more podcast before the 26th,
 and I'm still planning on podcasting my second program
 in the matrixcast.com series as well.
 So for sure, you can count on the matrixcast.com conversation
 between Ralph Abraham and William Irvin Thompson
 and the continuation of today's trialogue,
 which will be the next program here in the salon.
 Before I go, I want to mention that this
 and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
 are protected under the Creative Commons
 Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLite 3.0 license.
 And if you have any questions about that,
 just click on the Creative Commons link
 at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage.
 And if you have any questions, comments, complaints,
 or suggestions about these podcasts,
 please just add them as comments to the program notes
 on psychedelicsalon.org blog
 so that our entire community can get involved
 in these discussions.
 Or you can also post your thoughts
 on the Psychedelic Salon forum,
 which you'll find at thegrowreport.com,
 where, as I said, I also spend
 some of my online surfing time each week.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo
 signing off from cyberdelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
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