Sholto David is back, and what a story he has for you!

You won’t believe what the scientific method can prove when enough money is invested. Especially at MD Anderson Cancer Center!

There’s a lot of fraud going on at MD Anderson, starting with the curcumin fabrications of the long-sacked Bharat Aggarwal, over the Academy of Medicine fellow Anil Sood, the clown troupe of Mario Marques-Piubelli, Roberto Miranda and Francisco Vega, the charming couple Michael Andreeff and Marina Konopleva, and many others, and all the way to the very top, up to MD Anderson’s former President Ronald DePinho and his protege Norman Sharpless, who used to act as head of FDA and NIH National Cancer Institute during Trump’s first rule.

But those people at least pretend to study something resembling conventional cancer research.

Let Sholto, with some help of Smut Clyde, guide you to the world of magic.

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The Men Who Stare At Mice

By Sholto David

As Trump and his team move to apparently slash NIH funding, (or perhaps not, depending on who you listen to), much noise has been made about the value of NIH funded science, and their wise allocation of public money to vital research. Sometimes it seems like people on BlueSky really think we are just one more funding cycle away from curing all cancer. So let’s take a look at some of the crackhead troops on the front line of NIH funded cancer research, and see how they have been spending these precious funds.

Introducing Dr. Lorenzo Cohen who is the Richard E. Haynes Distinguished Professor in Clinical Cancer Prevention, and Director of the Integrative Medicine Program at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. For anyone unfamiliar, it may be worth mentioning that MD Anderson is likely the biggest cancer center in the world, so research at MD Anderson is certainly influential, for better, or worse.

From 2019 through to as recently as December 2024 Cohen has published a series of research papers and abstracts on the subject of “Biofield therapy”. What is “Biofield therapy”? Well… it seems to be just another name for magic, and I say that with an entirely straight face. Lorenzo is investigating actual wizards in his lab, and he is billing the NIH for it!

In 2019, along with six other gullible souls from MD Anderson, Lorenzo published this study:

Peiying Yang , Yan Jiang , Patrea R. Rhea , Tara L. Conway , Dongmei Chen , Mihai Gagea , Sean L. Harribance , Lorenzo Cohen Human Biofield Therapy and the Growth of Mouse Lung Carcinoma Integrative Cancer Therapies (2019) doi: 10.1177/1534735419840797

While the writing and figures in Yang et al 2019 take the general form of a research paper, the content is quite astonishing. From the introduction:

“This study sought to test the proposition that exposure to Sean L. Harribance (SLH), a purported healer, could modulate cancer cell growth in vitro using human and mouse non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells and in vivo using a syngeneic mouse lung carcinoma model.”

Yang et al. 2019

And who is Sean L. Harribance? Well for a start, he is the penultimate author of the paper. He is also an Honorary Lieutenant Colonel Aide-De-Camp of the Alabama State Militia, a Featured Member in Who’s Who in the World (2002-2016), president of the Sean Harribance Institute for Parapsychology, honorary director of the Sean Harribance Institute for Parapsychology Research… [Too many accolades to list]. He is also now deceased according to his website. Here is an image of his book, feel free to judge it by its cover.

What was his role in the study? Well he definitely wrote at least one paragraph, titled “Experimental Exposure”:

“Sean L. Harribance (SLH) produced the experimental condition (Ex exposure). SLH has psychic abilities and more recently has been considered a healer. He has been documented to accurately infer the memories and experiences of people and his accuracy has been correlated with specific neurological anomalies within his right prefrontal cortex as measured by QEEG and single-photon emission computerized tomography. What has been called the “Harribance Configuration” is a brief gamma (30-40 Hz) pattern over the right temporofrontal regions… SLH has been studied by numerous laboratories for over 20 years in various conditions.”

Yang et al. 2019

The Harribance Configuration would make a good book by Robert Ludlum (or possibly Trevanian). The term was coined by the late American-Canadian psychology professor Michael Persinger in this study:

Michael A. Persinger and Kevin S. Saroka. “Protracted parahippocampal activity associated with Sean Harribance.” International journal of yoga (2012) DOI: 10.4103/0973-6131.98238

“His primary financial income, which reflects the accuracy of his information, has been from his “readings” for a large population of repeat clients… It became evident that when his comments had been judged by others, Mr. Harribance’s brain was generating a reliable and predictable pattern over the right temporofrontal region. It was so obvious and consistent to everyone, even by gross visual inspection, that we called it the Harribance configuration.“

It is not clear why the physical presence of Harribance’s right prefrontal cortex was required for Cohen’s interventions, as Persinger showed long ago – in an Elsevier journal, no less (Karbowski et al 2012)! – that a recording of his cortical activity can be played back with comparable effect on melanoma-cell metabolism.

The EEG recordings even evoke activity in formalin-fixed but self-aware slices of human cerebrum (Rouleau & Persinger 2015). Life in the Persinger laboratory was never dull. If you are not kept awake worrying that you died long ago, and only exist now as a slice of pickled temporal lobe replaying engrams of past experience when stimulated by EEG recordings of the equally long-dead Sean Harribance, then you should be.

Back to Cohen’s research on Harribance, and keen students of experimental design already know that good scientific experiments need controls, so how did Cohen ensure that Harribance was using real magic to manipulate the cancer cells in the mice at MD Anderson?

“Lorenzo Cohen (LC) served for the control condition. The objective was to exactly mimic SLH’s movements when working with the cell and animal experiments. This would control for exposure to a human and movement. He also ensured the integrity of what was going on in the room during all experimental procedures. LC is a research psychologist who has conducted extensive research in psycho-oncology and studied mind body practices such as yoga, meditation, tai chi, and qigong (both external and internal qigong practices). Although a yoga practitioner himself, during the exposure sessions when he was observing and mimicking SLH’s movements he did not focus any thought toward the cells/animals and simply replicated SLH’s movements.”

Yang et al. 2019

Lorenzo Cohen ensured the integrity of what was going on in the room, and he did not use yoga on those animals!

The paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal hosted by SAGE. So thank you SAGE for immortalising this text and committing it to the scientific record. The editor of the Integrative Cancer Therapies, Keith I. Block of University of Illinois in Chicago, markets his own “integrative” approach to cancer therapy which includes acupuncture and yoga. So does Lorenzo Cohen, together with his wife Alison Jefferies (former president of the MD Anderson Cancer Center Fac­ulty and Family Organization), their joint book “Anticancer Living” has been endorsed by celebrity quacks Deepak Chopra and Swami Ramdev. Lorenzo is a very vocal advocate of yoga for cancer therapy:

It is mentioned in Cohen’s paper that he mimicked Harribance’s movements in the lab exactly, and fortunately we have a description of this comedy scene:

“For all experiments and all sessions, about half the time SLH either held both hands over the plated cells/experimental cages housing the mice or moved his right arm over the plates/cages. The other half of the time the plates/cages were kept on a shelf so that SLH could place his forehead near them as it was previously shown that the EMF activity was especially high around his right prefrontal cortex. LC watched SLH the whole time and mimicked all of his movements.”

Yang et al. 2019

I was about to make an artist’s impression of this, but incredibly we have a real photo of this happening from Harribance’s website, the caption on his website reads: “… the mice are drawn to Sean as he focuses his energy on them”.

The C57/BL6 mice in this photo have been implanted with mouse cancer cells which grow into tumours. The point of this experiment was to test if Harribance can slow the growth of these tumours by waving his arms around the mice and staring at them. Unbelievably the authors write that “All animal experiments were approved by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.” How can it possibly be ethical to give mice cancer, and try to cure them with psychic powers? The mice were put out of their misery after five or six sessions, the results were unsurprisingly written up in Harribance’s favour.

There isn’t much to be gained from critiquing studies that evaluate modalities as far-fetched as this. The authors state “Cells exposed to Ex and control conditions were housed in separate incubators. Similarly, the mice in the different groups were kept in separated racks in the housing facility”. A miserable skeptic would say that differences in the incubator temperature and animal housing are the more likely causes of any differences between experimental groups than Harribance having actual magical powers. In any case, the results are simply not compelling, Harribance wasn’t able to actually stop the tumours growing, he only apparently slowed the rate of tumour growth in some tests, the data in Figure 2 of the paper presents a mix of tumour weight and tumour volume and includes some p-values well known and beloved by social scientists, such as 0.04 and 0.03. I can say quite confidently that these results would not be convincing even if the subject of study was a promising drug candidate.

And now on to the most amusing part of all:

“The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was supported by Black Beret Life Sciences, Marie Bosarge, and the NIH/NCI under Award Number P30CA016672.”

Yang et al 2019

The venture capital company Black Beret Life Sciences was founded by Texas Billionaire Ed Bosarge. His (now estranged) wife Marie Bosarge is also mentioned as a funder. Around this time Ed Bosarge was entangled in a legal dispute over a Bahamas’ based stem cell clinic that he was funding, and later took control of. He was also involved in bitter divorce proceedings with Marie who accused him of hiding hundreds of millions of his wealth in a complex financial web. With such deep pockets involved, one has to wonder why Cohen needed to take money from the NIH for this silliness with Harribance at all… But he did. And then he did it again!

In 2020 Cohen published a similarly titled study, in the same SAGE journal:

Peiying Yang , Patrea R. Rhea , Tara Conway , Sita Nookala , Venkatesh Hegde , Mihai Gagea , Nadim J. Ajami , Sean L. Harribance , Jewel Ochoa , Jagannadha K. Sastry , Lorenzo Cohen Human Biofield Therapy Modulates Tumor Microenvironment and Cancer Stemness in Mouse Lung Carcinoma Integrative Cancer Therapies (2020) doi: 10.1177/1534735420940398 

Once again Sean L. Harribance is an author and all animal experiments were dutifully approved by the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

This time the headline result was a failure. No difference in tumour volume for the duration of the study. But the authors pivoted to focus on a myriad of other measurements, including counting the number of necrotic cells in tumours, and reporting on the behaviour of the mice, claiming that the treated mice were “calmer”. Some of these behavioural observations went awry due to “technical reasons” which are not elaborated on. Rather than accepting that the result as a dud, the authors wrote excuses like this:

“Even though we failed to observe the overall tumor suppression by the Ex exposure in mice bearing LLC tumor, our data continue to suggest that biofield therapy can alter the tumor microenvironment, such as immune modulation, and directly targets tumor cells, especially cancer stem cells (CSCs), which may have a tumor suppressive role.”

Yang et al 2020

It’s an interesting turn of phrase. The authors think they failed to observe the overall tumour suppression? So it was a failure of observation, but not a failure of Harribance’s magical powers? You’ll have to forgive me for forming the impression that the authors are biased because they clearly believe in magic. Perhaps the mice are evil sceptics too. The funding statement was, again, probably the most informative part of the whole paper:

“This project was supported in part by the Sean Harribance Institute for
Parapsychology Research, Stacey Schott, Black Beret Life
Sciences, and Ed Bosarge, Institutional NCI Grant P30CA016672,
and the Richard E. Haynes Distinguished Professorship for
Clinical Cancer Prevention at The University of Texas MD
Anderson Cancer Center.”

Yang et al 2020

Meanwhile, Peiying Yang progressed from assistant to associate professor, her MD Anderson lab studies “Botanical/natural products and nutritional interventions in cancer treatment” but also “other integrative medicine modalities in cancer care“, not further specified for a good reason.

You see, the biofield magic research continues! In 2022 Cohen and colleagues published an abstract for a poster presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR):

Peiying Yang , Sharmistha Chakraborty , Phuong Nguyen , Meng Cui , Andrew Cusimano , Daoyan Wei , Sarah Prinsloo , Lorenzo Cohen Abstract 5382: Biofield therapy suppressed the growth of human pancreatic cancer cells by modulation of cell cycle and cell voltage potentials Cancer Research (2022) doi: 10.1158/1538-7445.am2022-5382

There, the authors discuss various experiments on cancer cells using “human biofield therapy”, at least no mice were harmed this time. In 2024 another poster abstract was submitted for the AACR Annual meeting:

Peiying Yang , Sharmistha Chakraborty , Phuong Nguyen , Defeng Deng , Andrew Cusimano , Daoyan Wei , Lorenzo Cohen Abstract 4128: Biofield therapy suppressed invasion and metastases of human pancreatic cancer Cancer Research (2024) doi: 10.1158/1538-7445.am2024-4128 

Once again the gang are back to giving mice cancer and trying to cure them with magical powers. The authors state that this study was “in part supported by Emerald Gate Charitable Trust“. The mission of Emerald Gate is vague, it appears to have been founded by some more business types with more money than sense. Statements on the website seem fairly innocuous.

“Understanding the mechanisms by which human consciousness interacts with various forms of subtle energy and biology to promote healing and well-being in human beings.”

Emerald Gate

What this translates to in practice is paying people to poison mice and stare at them in plastic tubs. I suppose that really does promote well-being in characters like Lorenzo Cohen. And if the study was funded “in part” by Emerald Gate, who funded the other part?!

Another full paper was published in Scientific Reports on the 2nd December 2024. Remember, in October 2024 Dorothy Bishop posted an open letter criticising the poor quality of papers published in this journal, Chris Graf (head of research integrity at Springer Nature) replied:

“Scientific Reports has an in-house team who are dedicated to ensuring that the journal operates with integrity. They are an excellent team who care enormously about the journal and the research it publishes.”

Chris Graff Springer Nature

One would have thought by December 2024 a hard stop would have been placed on papers related to magic. But Lorenzo Cohen was able to publish this:

Lorenzo Cohen, Arnaud Delorme , Andrew Cusimano , Sharmistha Chakraborty , Phuong Nguyen , Defeng Deng , Shafaqmuhammad Iqbal , Monica Nelson , Daoyan Wei , Chris Fields , Peiying Yang Examining the effects of biofield therapy through simultaneous assessment of electrophysiological and cellular outcomes Scientific Reports (2024) doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-79617-3 

As I mentioned previously, Sean L. Harribance is now deceased, but fortunately Cohen and Yang have recruited another wizard to their lab. Here is a description of the method involved:

“The unique participant was a male BT practitioner, age 71, using the Bengston Energy Healing Method. Central to this method is the practice of Image Cycling, a process that involves rapidly cycling through a series of mental images of personal desires or outcomes. This practice is designed to enhance the treatment process by engaging the practitioner’s focus and energy in a dynamic and fast-paced manner. The technique is mechanical and devoid of any specific belief system. Also, the treatment intent is not a formed or focused concentration on the target, as the practitioner claims he tries to “get out of the way.” The participant was one of the most experienced in employing this technique, with over two decades of practice.”

Cohen et al 2024

Smut Clyde has provided further details on the history of the Bengston Energy Healing method as a Coda below (suffice to say, it is even less scientific than it was made to sound here). And again we are blessed with a photo which I did not edit for dramatic effect.

Tellingly the authors write:

“The current study did not assess any purported mechanisms of BT.”

Cohen et al 2024

Of course they could not discuss the mechanism. It would require a level of absurdity which even Springer Nature might shudder at… So they published their musings on the mechanism in an MDPI journal instead:

Chris Fields , Lorenzo Cohen , Andrew Cusimano , Sharmistha Chakraborty , Phuong Nguyen , Defeng Deng , Shafaqmuhammad Iqbal , Monica Nelson , Daoyan Wei , Arnaud Delorme , Peiying Yang Search for Entanglement between Spatially Separated Living Systems: Experiment Design, Results, and Lessons Learned Biophysica (2024) doi: 10.3390/biophysica4020012

This paper discusses some quantum idiocy with the help of a new cast of clowns, including some Frenchman named Arnaud Delorme who is additionally affiliated to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California. His clairvoyance paper Delorme et al 2016, titled “Prediction of Mortality Based on Facial Characteristics”, was retracted by Frontiers in 2016.

At this point I wanted to mention that part of the Cohen’s motivation for engaging in these studies relate to four papers on “External Qi” that are cited early in the introduction of the 2019 paper. These studies were published by researchers affiliated to US institutions including Harvard and MIT. Elisabeth Bik blogged about these papers in 2019, and two of the “External Qi” papers were later retracted by Springer Nature, Yan et al 2012, and Yan et al 2008.

The retraction notices state: “Post-publication peer review has concluded that there is no information on or plausible molecular mechanism which explains what the External Qi of Yan Xin Qigong is, how it is produced, and how it could be reproduced by others”. Notably, these “External Qi” researchers did not progress to testing their theories in mice. Noteworthy, before turning to “biofield” magic, Cohen did test “External qigong therapy” on cancer patients, concluding it to be ineffective due to certain limitations:

Lorenzo Cohen , Zhen Chen , Banu Arun , Zhimin Shao , Mark Dryden , Linhhui Xu , Carisa Le-Petross , Basak Dogan , Brian J. McKenna , Maurie Markman , Gildy Babiera External Qigong Therapy for Women With Breast Cancer Prior to Surgery Integrative Cancer Therapies (2010) doi: 10.1177/1534735410387424 

“Because of the small sample size and working with only one qigong practitioner, to definitively determine the efficacy or lack of efficacy of EQT, a larger study with multiple qigong practitioners would need to be conducted.”

Cohen et al 2010

Overall this story is very concerning to me on a few different levels. How is it possible in 2024 for researchers at MD Anderson to investigate magic? If these animal experiments really were approved, what does that tell us about the competency of animal research oversight? How has Cohen been able to publish in supposedly reputable journals and conferences? Do Cohen’s colleagues and superiors know or care that he hosts wizards in his lab? Or perhaps this is simply common place, wizards roam throughout MD Anderson free range, blasting the cancer-mice with their mind powers. Is Cohen still spending NIH money on investigating magic? The abstracts submitted to AACR suggest there is work still to be published, perhaps we’ll find out soon who is paying for it.

At the top of the article I hinted that I think this is an extreme waste of NIH money, and of course most NIH funds are not spent explicitly investigating magic, but the methods Cohen employs are in fact much the same as many other cancer research labs, only the treatment he chose is far-fetched. The replication crisis in psychology was (in part) triggered by researchers realising that Daryl Bem was using perfectly standard psychology research methods to “prove” extra sensory perception was real.

The serious lesson here is that Cohen is using typical cancer research methods to “prove” magic can treat cancer in mice, and thinking about cells can change their behaviour. Apparently there are no safeguards to stop him publishing these results in peer-reviewed journals and presenting them at serious conferences (indeed he does not seem short of eager co-authors). So I will concede that while the NIH does not routinely fund research into magic, it might as well, because the methods often used by cancer researchers cannot distinguish magic from “real science”. Amusingly, this seems like exactly the sort of stupidity that the new Health Secretary RFK Jr would love, maybe we are set to see an increase in Cohen’s NIH awards.

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Notes by SD:

• It is also worth mentioning that David Gorski at Science-Based Medicine has blogged about Cohen previously, but I can’t see that anyone has discussed Cohen’s paraonconlogy adventures before.
• With thanks to Raynard at the Mind of Steele YouTube Channel for bringing these papers to my attention and to generous Patreon donors. Smut Clyde provided important scientific contributions to our understanding of the “Harribance configuration” in this piece, and as promised provides further details in the history of magic and the Bengston Energy Healing Method:

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Coda by Smut Clyde

These ladies and gentlemen of Cohen’s team forgot the well-attested fact that mice can have the property of spin. If, in particular, they are fermions with half-integer spin, it is natural for two mice occupying the same orbit laboratory to become quantum-entangled. So when Harribance was treating one group of mice by mentally massaging their auras, the treatment overlapped to the putative but spin-coupled controls and extended their lives as well: there is no such thing as a control mouse.

Quantumouse entanglement was invoked by Bengston and Krinsley back in 2000… no NIH resources were involved, but a digression can still be excused.

William F. Bengston & David Krinsley, The Effect of the “Laying On of Hands” on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice, Journal of Scientific Exploration, (2000) Vol. 14(3):353–364

Like Cohen et al., these two researchers attempted to kill C3H/HeJ mice (so highly inbred as to qualify as European royalty) with injected xenografts – mammary adenocarcinoma cells, this time, cell-line H2712. Mice subjected to Healing Touch from Bengston mustered a sufficient immune response to reject the grafts! Yay Healing Touch! So did the control group, however. The authors claimed credit for curing both sets of mice – the hands-free as well as the Hands-Laid-On group – since they had broken experimental protocol by looking at the former group, thereby quantum-entangling them. That is, the purported ‘control group’ had really been a DOUBLE SECRET PROBATION Treatment group all along. 

The authors therefore repeated the trial, this time training Krinsley and three anonymous sceptics in the mental disciplines and aura-massaging skills of Healing Touch (as you do). Again, both the handled and unhandled mice shrugged off their injections. This was explained by extracting a confession from one volunteer that he or she had repeated the protocol breach by looking at the control group and thereby healing them as well. Between the sceptical assertions in the paper that “I never thought healing powers would happen to me,” the amount of anonymity and the frequency with which protocols are transgressed, the paper reads more and more like a Penthouse Letter to the Editor.

Bengston continued his experiments with a different co-author:

William F. Bengston and Margaret Moga, Resonance, Placebo Effects, and Type II Errors: Some Implications from Healing Research for Experimental Methods The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (2007) doi: 10.1089/acm.2007.6300

This time with “distance healing” radiating from two healers 760 miles away. Both treated and untreated mice survived, though in the new research paradigm – justified by a lengthier exploration of the quantum-resonance explanation – this is a GOOD thing. Disappointingly, there were no appearances from a like-minded and not-to-be-outdone pizza delivery girl.

“Conventional biologic research dictates that any evidence of successful intervention of the healing-with-intent techniques would be found in the difference between the experimental and control groups. The resonance hypothesis would predict that if the healing techniques were to be successful, then the experimental and control mice would exhibit similarities.”

Bengston & Moga 2007

No-one considers the equally well-attested fact that laboratory mice often turn out to be three-dimensional projections of superintelligent multi-dimensional entities, who delight in performing “incredibly elegant psychological experiments on people by, say, running down the maze the wrong way or suddenly not dying of cancer.”

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