Lives of the Psychics: The Shared Worlds of Science and Mysticism
By Fred M. Frohock
University of Chicago Press, 281 pages

The Second Creation: Dolly and the Age of Biological Control
By Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 333 pages

Let's start at the very beginning: the title. Evoking every Roman Catholic schoolchild's religious training, it prepares us for stories of extraordinary souls who, even if they are not saints, should mesmerize us with the grandeur of their experiences. Moreover, the subtitle leads us, C.S. Lewis-style, to expect an engagement or, at the very least, a rapprochement between the methods of science and the insights of faith. And what do we discover on Page 1 of the preface?

Frohock's daughter Christina has a nightmare. She is watching television and sees a plane crash that has taken her daddy, days before he is to fly away to a foreign country. Fact: The plane on which he had flown to Madrid did later crash. Lesson: Behold the psychic insight of little children into the unknown.

One wonders: Has Frohock ever joined other parents at play groups, particularly parents who fly frequently? It would seem not, for if he had he might have heard a dozen, several score, possibly several hundred if he circulated a bit, stories about small children suffering separation anxiety at a parent's departure, stories in which the children slip into terrors about their parents' disappearance and demise, their nightmares stitched together from television footage of airplane crashes.

Is it disturbing to have held one's sobbing child and then to have been on a plane that we know has crashed? Certainly. Is it disturbing to look in the rearview mirror on a busy freeway and see a car spin out of control behind us? Surely so. There but for the grace of God ... If we live long enough, not one of us in the modern world will fail to have such a moment. But most of us, fortunately, do not spittle out tomes about these random events and claim them as proof of a second psychic reality. We recognize, as children of Einstein and Bohr, or as high school students of introductory quantum theory and particle physics, that uncertainty pervades the universe, that random clustering of matter and action punctuate existence and that the human mind is eternally hungry to assert its own meaning over events that seem to be beyond our control. Perhaps most to the point, those of us who possess faith know as well that it has not come to us through the recounted anecdotes of magicians and "healers" whose stories are the common currency of the National Star and "Lives of the Psychics."

Not that Frohock's topics are uninteresting. His long chapter on ESP and the ability of study subjects to divine information posted on blind test cards gives his paragraphs the shadow of scientific evaluation. Indeed, as he notes, military investigators both in the United States and in the former Soviet Union conducted extensive research on such phenomena. One of the most productive of these exercises brought together a panel of psychics to describe Russian military installations, and, Frohock tells us, the psychics produced "useful information roughly 10 to 15 percent of the time."

Intriguing. His source? One Richard Broughton, director of something called the Rhine Research Center. The Rhine Center was a descendant of a parapsychology lab that was once housed at Duke University and was directed by the grandfather of anti-behavioral, anti-cognitive psychology, J.B. Rhine. Once Rhine retired, the lab was put out to pasture. Broughton might be a very reliable source, yet it seems strange that Frohock's report on military research includes no data or response or commentary from anyone in the military. Stranger still when we come to know that Broughton -- the source -- has no interest any longer in verifiable, empirical method. Indeed, he abjures any participation in conventional methods of scientific verification, as in: Trust us, we have special access to the other realm of knowing.

What is most exasperating about Frohock's method is his pose of dispassionate inquiry. In Chapter 4 -- "Intuitive Science" -- he casts the metaphysical, intuitive psychics against the deep skeptics. Fair enough. Intuition, he says, often leads us to press on beyond the apparent empirical evidence. In such manner, we are told, did Copernicus finally establish that the Earth revolves around the sun, displacing the Ptolemaic system, which had the sun spinning around the Earth. Oops! Copernicus as intuitive psychic? Hardly. It was the evidence available to Copernicus, based on astronomical observation and data, that led him to demonstrate the flaws of the old explanation.

Worse still, Frohock moves to claim one of the great geniuses of 20th century medical science, Dr. Judah Folkman. Early in his career Folkman suspected that cancerous tumors induce the body to build new blood vessels to feed the tumorous mass, a process now known as "angiogenesis." For decades, established cancer researchers doubted the thesis, and Folkman was unable to demonstrate sufficient evidence for his hypothesis. "Like many movements in science," Frohock writes, "Folkman's work initially encountered replication problems: In November 1998 officials at the National Cancer Institute announced that their scientists had been unable to reproduce the results of the experiments. Folkman counseled patience. Then, in February 1999, scientists at the institute announced that they had finally confirmed some of Folkman's experiments. Plans were put in place to begin testing the drugs on people."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"