Discovery Lab Answers

Bernard Grad: Experiments and Data

Bernard Grad (February 4, 1920 – December 27, 2010) was an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, where he conducted a thirty-six year career combining conventional research on aging and cancer with experimental investigation of healing phenomena ^[3]. He is widely credited as a foundational figure in laboratory healing research — William Bengston’s tribute describes him as “The Father of Healing Research” ^[3].

Background and Intellectual Formation

Grad’s interest in subtle energy was personal as well as scientific. A young Grad used a Wilhelm Reich-style orgone accumulator (ORAC) during his own health recovery, and he considered Reich a mentor ^[6]. This shaped his later experimental work: rather than dismissing Reich’s claims, he attempted to test them under controlled laboratory conditions ^[1].

Plant Growth and Laying-on-of-Hands Studies

Among Grad’s most cited work are experiments examining whether human healing intent could produce measurable biological effects. A bibliography compiled by Stephan A. Schwartz lists two Grad papers on what Grad termed a “telekinetic effect on plant growth”:

• Grad (1963) — A telekinetic effect on plant growth: I. International Journal of Parapsychology, 5(2):117–134
• A follow-up experiment involving treatment of saline solution ^[5]

These studies investigated whether healers holding sealed containers of water used to irrigate plants could influence plant growth rates relative to untreated controls. The broader healing research bibliography in which these appear also references work by Justa Smith on enzyme activity effects, noting that “spiritual healers and a believing physician produced significant results (p < 0.00014)” in yeast experiments, while indifferent students produced chance results — though that specific result is from Haraldsson and Thorsteinsson (1973), not Grad ^[5]. The Schwartz bibliography groups these studies as part of a lineage that Grad’s plant-growth work helped establish ^[5].

Orgone Accumulator / Heat Experiments

In a 1996 paper published in Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine, Grad reported a series of temperature experiments designed to test Reich’s claim that orgone energy accumulates inside an ORAC cabinet ^[1]. The experimental setup compared temperatures at multiple points — inside the ORAC (T1), outside it (T2), their difference (Td), and a plastic funnel reference (Tpl) — over an extended measurement period.

Key reported findings from that paper ^[1]:

Grad concluded that the deviation of observed values from those expected by conventional theory was “highly significant (p < 0.001)” and argued that Reich’s orgone physics offered a framework for understanding the anomalous findings, while acknowledging that further study was required to decide between alternative explanations ^[1].

Intention Effects on Biological Systems: Broader Context

Schwartz’s published bibliography situates Grad’s healing work within a larger body of research on whether human intention can affect biological systems ^[5]. That literature includes:

• Braud and Schlitz’s meta-analysis of 15 studies (323 sessions, 62 influencers, 271 subjects) on distant influence of electrodermal activity — 6 of 15 studies (40%) produced significant results; 5% of sessions were successful (p = .000023) ^[5]
• Onetto and Elguin (1966) on tumor growth in mice: treated mice showed significantly less tumor growth than untreated mice (p < 0.01) ^[5]
• Blood platelet enzyme activity experiments by healers ^[5]

Grad’s plant and animal studies are cited as establishing the early methodological template for this line of research ^[3][5]. Schwartz’s intention-effects work on infrared spectrophotometry and wine-tasting experiments explicitly traces its lineage to Grad, Justa Smith, and related researchers.

Legacy and Recognition

Lenore Wiand’s tribute, written at Grad’s death in 2010, records that in his final years Grad described his goal as wanting to be “factual” and to do “scientific work… to get to the mystery of it” ^[2]. Bengston’s account notes that when Grad began this research, “just asking the questions that Bernie asked could mean professional ruin” ^[3]. The Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine Journal dedicated a memorial issue (Volume 21, Number 2) to his legacy ^[2][4].

Skeptical Critiques

What critics argue. The core methodological challenge to Grad-style healing experiments is that single-experimenter designs — where the researcher is aware of which subjects are healers — introduce expectancy and handling confounds. Critics have noted that plant-growth experiments in particular are susceptible to subtle differences in watering volume, soil preparation, or physical handling of containers by healers versus controls, and that blinding is difficult to achieve. The broader critique, applicable across the healing-research lineage Grad founded, is that effect sizes tend to shrink or disappear under tighter controls.

What the experimental data show. The retrieved sources do not contain a formal reanalysis or published refutation of Grad’s specific plant-growth or heat-experiment data. The Schwartz bibliography ^[5] notes that Haraldsson and Thorsteinsson (1973) independently replicated intention effects on yeast growth with significant results (p < 0.00014) using healers, while indifferent students produced chance results — a pattern consistent with Grad’s original framing but not a direct replication of his specific protocol. The 1996 heat experiments ^[1] explicitly acknowledge that conventional explanations cannot be fully ruled out for some findings and call for further study.

Analysis. Grad’s plant-growth studies from the early 1960s predated modern pre-registration and blinding standards. Independent replication of his specific plant-growth protocols under conditions meeting contemporary methodological benchmarks has not been documented in the sources retrieved for this question. The heat-experiment paper ^[1] was published three decades after the original healing studies and represents a distinct line of inquiry (physical rather than biological systems); Grad himself frames its conclusions as provisional.

For deeper coverage of the intention-effects research tradition that Grad’s work helped establish, the Stephan A. Schwartz page surveys the infrared spectrophotometry and related studies that explicitly build on Grad’s foundational contributions.