Rhine Research Center Plans to Build a New Home in Durham - Brief Article

Parapsychology is going to get a new home.

That is, parapsychologists at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, named for J.B. Rhine, the so-called father of parapsychology who conducted his experiments in Durham, plan to trade in the Colonial Revival-style home they have occupied for forty years for a new building constructed solely for the study of psi phenomena.

The Rhine Research Center is the nation's oldest laboratory for the scientific study of psychic experiences, telepathy, and ESP. The center's board of directors have sold the pre-1920s house to Duke University and plan a new $300,000 to $500,000 center near Duke's West Campus.

According to a feature article in the Raleigh News & Observer (March 12), center officials hope to be in the new building by April 2002. They say it will

have capabilities the old one never had as the center expands its research in what the newspaper called "a renaissance for psychic studies."

There are other labs for psi research, but Stephan A. Schwartz, a spokesman for the Parapsychological Association, said he could think of no freestanding building in the United States that has been constructed from the ground up for studying parapsychology, as the new one will be. Schwartz said the Rhine Research center is to parapsychology what St. Andrews is to golf.

There's even talk at Rhine of officially joining forces with Duke again, through the Duke University Health System's Center for Integrative Medicine.

"Thirty years ago, there was a huge chasm between parapsychology and standard biomedical research," the newspaper quotes Martin J. Sullivan, co-director of the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine, as saying. "The edges are blurring."

Critics of parapsychology say most of the experiments conducted by J.B. Rhine and his associates in Durham starting in the late 1920s, are, in retrospect, flawed, unreplicable, and inconclusive. But the article says many parapsychologists have moved past the question of whether psi exists-they assume it does-to the questions of how it works and what it can be used for.

Said John Palmer, director of the Rhine Research Center, "We're very confident we're not wasting our time.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group