Well, thank you very much for the kind of invitation. As a police scientist, one of the questions I often get,

this started actually before I was the police when I was MIT, was all about prayer. And how do we know if prayer works?

And so what I'm going to do today, given that this is a medical school, is I'm going to divide the talk primarily to two bits.

So the first bit is going to be the science of prayer.

We're going to look at some of the randomized clinical trials associated with prayer,

where prayer is understood as a clinical intervention

that would attempt to accelerate healing and improve health outcomes.

Then I'd go, I'd like to move to the theology of prayer, and I'm going to, because I'm a Catholic priest,

so prayer, of course, is broad and encompasses many different religious traditions.

I'm going to focus primarily on the Christian account of prayer, and I'm going to rely on the systematic, insightful, really sophisticated theological account

provided by Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican Catholic medieval philosopher and philosopher

and theologian who lived 800 years ago.

And then I'm going to end with just a couple of comments based on the bioethics.

So I work in bioethics primarily.

So my current interest now is CRISPR and relationship with CRISPR,

the sort of kind of ethical questions raised by CRISPR,

in terms of like gene drive as well as modifications of the human genome, both

somatic as well as germline.

But here's a thing.

What is the role of prayer in clinical practice?

And what are the ethical questions that are raised by that?

Because there was a study that estimated that about 50% of patients in the United States

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