The October Lawrence Summers Memorial Award goes to Dr. Richard Nahin, a senior adviser at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Noting that many of those who pray seeking improvement for others are poor people with limited access to healthcare, Nahin told the New York Times, “It is a public health imperative to understand if this prayer offers them any benefit.”

The U.S. federal government has spent $2.3 million over the past four years on prayer research, an expenditure that has critics fuming. The prayer research initiative actually began during the Clinton presidency.

The studies concern not the benefits of prayer by a sick person, but prayer for that person by another.

“Even many churchgoers are skeptical that prayer can be subjected to scientific scrutiny,” the New York Times reports. “For one thing, prayers vary in their purpose and content: some give praise, others petition for strength, many ask only that God's will be done. For another, not everyone sees God as one who does favors on request.”

Source: Benedict Carey, “Can Prayers Heal? Critics Say Studies Go Past Science's Reach,” The New York Times, October 10, 2004.