: Witch Doctor . Michael Gelfand.

Salem Witch Trials: The Fungus Theory Witch or Psychedelic Trip?

During the winter of 1692 eight girls came down with a mysterious and terrifying illness in the colonial town of Salem, Massachusetts. They vomited, screamed incomprehensibly, claimed to see things that weren’t there, felt the crawling and pricking of invisible needles against their skin, and convulsed and contorted into impossible positions. Physicians were called to examine the girls, but the...

Witch-hunt

Beginning two years ago, the US Dept of Health and Human Services began "special reviews" of all current research grants that involved harm reduction, sex and drugs, and continues its ban on funding of needle exchange. With Bush's second term, the campaign was extended to all US funded international programs that dealt with these issues and populations. And, most recently, the US has again unde...

Relative Rates of Appearance of Lymphocytes Bearing Surface Immunoglobulin and Complement Receptors by Michael C. Gelfand,*

The class of mammalian lymphocytes equivalent to the bursa-derived (B) 1 lymphocytes of birds may be identified by the presence of large amounts of immunoglobulin (Ig) on the surface of most of these cells (1, 2). In addition, many of these B lymphocytes, but not thymus-derived (T) lymphocytes, bear a surface receptor for an activated component of C3 allowing them to bind antigen-antibody-compl...

The Salem Witch Project

The received view is that the grammar of meaning claims is descriptive. It is our purpose in what follows to deny this consensus.. . . We offer, instead, a radically normative position on meaning claims. That is, we do not content ourselves with the relatively common view that part of the pattern characterized in ascribing meanings is the structure of socially accepted norms of a society. Rathe...

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?