Journal of Parapsychology, The: Obituary - Elisabeth F. Targ

ELISABETH F. TARG: 1961-2002

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ, a pioneer in the field of mind/body medical research, died July 18th of a brain tumor at the age of 40. Dr. Targ was devoted to helping reduce human suffering and exploring the frontiers of human knowledge, serving as a practicing physician, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Director of the Complementary Medicine Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Elisabeth was much loved personally as wife, daughter, sister, aunt, friend, colleague, and healer. She was known more widely for her work as an editorial board member of Alternative Therapies journal, a contributing columnist for Spirituality and Health magazine, a research associate of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and an "out of the box" scientist whose research made distant healing a respected field of medicine.

Dr. Targ had an early introduction to psychic research through her father, Russell, and she participated in many successful studies of extrasensory perception throughout her life. Physicist and parapsychology researcher Russell reports that when Elisabeth was a child, she was often able to describe what was in her birthday packages before she opened them. When she was 8, she was one of the most outstanding participants working with a four-choice random number generated ESP-teaching machine. A little later, she was teaching her friends playing hide-and-seek how to remote view where playmates were hiding before setting out to find them. In 1972, at the age of 12, she traveled to Iceland to watch her uncle Bobby Fischer win the world chess championship, and then continued on to Edinburgh, Scotland, to attend her first Parapsychological Association (PA) meeting. At age 13, Elisabeth started working in Karl Pribram's renowned brain lab at Stanford.

Published psychic research by Elisabeth Targ includes experiments with her father Russell showing that feedback is not necessary for successful remote viewing and that targets with a high probability of occurring do not interfere with the correct psychic perception of lower probability targets. As a college freshman, Targ did a highly successful remote viewing study with her classmates as viewers, showing that small objects are easier to describe than numbers. In the 1980s, along with PA members James Spottiswoode and Hella Hammid, she did such successful precognitive remote viewing for high, low, and medium roulette numbers in Las Vegas that the men in black vests threw them out of the casino.

Elisabeth received her MD and a master's degree in neuropharmacology from Stanford University, where she also received a Russian language translator's certificate. She was so adept in the language that at age 21, she addressed the Russian Academy of Sciences, describing in fluent Russian the remote viewing work done by her father and others at Stanford Research Institute for the previous decade.

From Stanford, Dr. Targ went to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she began working with AIDS patients, finding that group therapy was as useful as Prozac for fighting depression. She began her formal inquiry of mind-body-spirit medicine through a peer-reviewed study on the complementary use of alternative medicine in the treatment of women with late-stage breast cancer. Some of the adjunctive treatments she investigated there included support groups incorporating guided imagery, art and dance therapy, meditation, and ritual. Based on the success of the study, she helped create a center sponsored by the Department of Defense at the University of California, San Francisco, which she helped direct.

In 1997, Dr. Targ designed a study and secured funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore distant healing and prayer as trainable skills that nurses and other health professionals might integrate into their healing work. Principally, the study examines the efficacy of prayer on patients with a rare form of brain cancer, glioblastoma. Shortly after receiving funding from the NIH, Dr. Targ herself was diagnosed with this same form of cancer, which claimed her life a short 3 months later.

Elisabeth Targ will be best remembered for her enthusiasm and commitment to the study of the possible efficacy of prayer and love in healing. Through randomized double-blind clinical trials, she and her colleagues found strong evidence that HIV-positive AIDS patients who received prayers from distant healers of a variety of faiths had significantly better medical outcomes than patients who did not receive supportive prayers. This inspiring study was published in the Western Journal of Medicine in 1999 and was discussed in diverse forums ranging from Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and Oprah Magazine. Her monthly column in Spirituality and Health Magazine, "Open Mind--Open Heart," helped translate healing research findings into a popular medium.

According to her colleagues, Elisabeth Targ's aim in conducting research was never to provide final or definite answers but to create question-generating hypotheses, bringing new horizons of science into view. From her sick bed, she declared that her fondest wish was to be "the Virgin Mary's assistant," helping people to love and to heal, and that is how many of us who knew her will remember her.