Low doses of bisphenol A make female mice behave more like males.

In 1936, researchers found that BPA acts much like the hormone estrogen. Scientists now estimate that more than 6 billion pounds of the chemical are manufactured for use in products such as polycarbonate plastic-the resin lining food cans-and dental sealants. Citing the precautionary principle, city supervisors for San Francisco recently banned the chemical for use in products, such as baby bottles, that are intended for use by children under 3 years of age.

In the latest study, published in the journal Endocrinology, Beverly Rubin, an associate professor of cellular biology at Tufts University, and colleagues placed tiny pumps into female mice. From the 8th day of pregnancy until the 16th day of nursing, these pumps released doses of BPA into the mothers. This time period is critical because on the eighth day of development, embryonic mice begin growing neurons in a region of the brain that is critical for sexual behavior.

Most importantly, says Rubin, the concentrations administered were very tiny. One set of mothers was exposed to doses of 250 nanograms per kilogram per day (ng/kg/d) of BPA, while the other set was dosed at only 25 ng/kg/d.

"The levels of bisphenol A that were used are within the range that is estimated to be found in humans," she says. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 95% of Americans excrete at least 100 parts per trillion (ppt) of BPA in their urine.

The scientists then examined the brains and behavior of the new generation of mice. In a section of the brain that controls the sexual cycle, female mice have 2-3 times as many neurons as males. But female mice who had been exposed to BPA while still in the womb were found to have fewer neurons than usual in this area of the brain. Female mice are typically more energetic than males, but the activity level of females who had been exposed to BPA dropped and mirrored that of their brothers.

"We found that the differences between males and females, at least for these two markers, were obliterated," adds Rubin.

But Steve Hentges, executive director of the American Plastics Council, says he finds little that is compelling in the research. "This study is of limited relevance to human health. A more robust study should be done," he says.

"We are within the human exposure range," counters Ana Soto, a Tufts professor of cellular biology and coauthor of the paper. She points out that other studies have found that BPA can lead to problems of the reproductive tract in both male and female rodents. "There is plenty of evidence now that low-dose levels lead to problems," she adds.

Few studies have reported on how BPA might harm humans. One study found that exposure to BPA is associated with recurrent miscarriage.

For almost two decades, Fred vom Saal, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri, has been investigating chemicals that alter the hormone system. "The findings reported in this study show permanent changes to the brain at doses that are 2000-20,000 times lower than what is estimated to be safe," he says. In January, vom Saal published an article that examined 120 papers on BPA. Of these studies, 109 found effects on experimental animals from low doses-40 of them at concentrations below the U.S. EPA's recommended safe level of 50 micrograms/kg/d.

However, he reported that 11 studies funded by industry found no effect from BPA.

And in a paper published in Cancer Research, scientists discovered that BPA can permanently alter DNA in rats. Like in the Rubin study, researchers exposed fetal rats to BPA at similar levels to those found in humans. When later tested, the male rats had DNA with an altered methylation pattern. Methyl groups act like switches and when attached to DNA can shut down gene expression. In this case, the excess methylation occurred on genes that regulate the function of the prostate, a gland that is influenced by hormones. Rats with this disrupted methylation pattern showed an increased incidence of precancerous prostate lesions.

Commenting on Rubin's research, Scott Belcher, an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of Cincinnati, says that the work does an excellent job of measuring low-dose responses in classic behavior and neuroanatomical studies.

Last December, Belcher published an article in Endocrinology reporting that rat brains were affected by BPA at doses below 1 ppt. "It was very surprising to see how the effects correlate with levels that have been found in humans," he says.

"How does one justify balancing the risk of fatal liver failure against one day less of ear pain?" Dr. Rosemary Johann-Liang, an official in the Office of Drug Safety at the agency, wrote in one of the memorandums, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

Sanofi-Aventis is sponsoring four clinical trials in children ages 6 months to 13 years, according the Web site posting. The drug agency approved plans for the trials.

There is growing evidence that Ketek is unusually toxic, according to a recent review by F.D.A. safety officials. Twelve adult patients in the United States have suffered liver failure, including four who died; 23 others suffered serious liver injury.

The safety officials wrote in their review that the agency should consider forcing Sanofi-Aventis to withdraw Ketek from the market, severely restrict its uses, even in adults, or add a prominent warning to its label about potentially fatal side effects.

More than five million prescriptions for Ketek have been written in the United States since its approval two years ago.

Asked about the memorandum written by Dr. Johann-Liang, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, Susan Bro, said that it was "a preliminary, raw assessment" and that "the final decision will be made by experts who have the full benefit of a large section of opinion and scientific fact."

Melissa Feltmann, a spokeswoman for Sanofi-Aventis, said in an e-mail message, "We are engaged in ongoing discussions with the F.D.A. regarding Ketek."

Other antibiotics cause liver failure, but Ketek seems to do so almost four times as often, the safety officials concluded in the review.

Ketek can also cause blurred vision and loss of consciousness, problems that are unique to it. In her memorandum, Dr. Johann-Liang asked how Sanofi-Aventis's investigators were going to assess whether infants were suffering blurred vision.

"If we cannot monitor for this event in infants/young children appropriately in the clinical trial setting, what can we conclude from the safety results of the trial?" she asked.

Dr. Danny Benjamin, an infectious-disease specialist at Duke University who was consulted separately by the drug agency, concluded that the pediatric trials with Ketek were a cause for concern and "hard to support," according to the memorandums obtained by The New York Times.

Dr. Benjamin did not respond to voice-mail or e-mail messages left for him yesterday.

In his memorandum, Dr. Benjamin said that in up to 87 percent of cases, pediatric ear infections resolved within a few days without treatment. Tests of an unusually risky antibiotic in infants with ear infections might be justified if the infants had already been treated unsuccessfully with safer antibiotics first, he wrote.

Sanofi-Aventis planned to give Ketek as a first-line therapy, according to the company's trial descriptions.

The drug agency's actions in regard to Ketek are being investigated by Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, as well as by Representatives Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Henry A. Waxman of California, both Democrats.

Sanofi-Aventis first asked the agency to approve the drug in February 2000. But officials demurred, citing reports of side effects. So the company undertook a study of Ketek in 24,000 patients to prove its safety. The trial was marred by fraud. One of the investigators on the study is now in federal prison; another lost his medical license.

The F.D.A. said it dismissed the study's results and instead asked the company to report its experience with Ketek in Europe, where it was approved in 2001. Although it is unusual for the agency to approve a drug based upon its use elsewhere, in April 2004, it . did just that, approving Ketek to treat sinusitis, bronchitis and pneumonia.

Since then, problems with the drug have continued to mount. By April, the agency had reports of 110 cases of liver problems associated with Ketek, most of which occurred in otherwise healthy people, according to the safety review. In one, a 49-year-old woman took no more than two doses of the drug before becoming nauseous and vomiting. She was hospitalized five days later and died.

Since they are submitted voluntarily, these kinds of case reports usually represent only a small fraction - estimates range from 1 percent to 10 percent - of actual drug problems. The reports that the F.D.A. has received so far are unusual because of their "rapid tempo and severity," the agency's internal safety report said.

The agency officials estimated that Ketek caused acute liver failure in 23 people for every 10 million prescriptions, about four times the rate of such events seen in other antibiotics.

In 1999, sales of the antibiotic Trovan were severely restricted after it was shown to cause liver failure in 58 people for every 10 million prescriptions.

In her memorandum, Dr. Johann-Liang suggested that Ketek's risks outweighed its benefits.

She noted that powerful antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones can also damage the liver. But she said that those drugs were available in intravenous forms and "are also used for more serious infectious diseases rather than solely for minor upper respiratory indications," as Ketek is.

Dr. Johann-Liang wrote in her memorandum that the parents of patients in Sanofi-Aventis's pediatric trials must be better informed about Ketek's risks "in order for any of these trials to continue to proceed."

She added that the parents "need to know that the 'close monitoring' for visual events is not possible in very young children, and the long-term consequences of such adverse reactions are unknown for the developing system."

Dr. Benjamin agreed that the brochure about the trials and informed-consent material given to parents "must address in plain language the risks, and severity of risks, of adverse events."

The report from Boston University School of Medicine also found that the fewest weight problems occur among children whose parents are "authoritative" -- having high expectations for self control but respectful of a child's opinions and who set clear boundaries.

The study also found that children of parents who are permissive, defined as indulgent and without discipline, also have weight problems but not to the degree of the offspring of strict disciplinarians with low levels of sensitivity, the study said.

Researchers also found that children of neglectful mothers and fathers, those who are emotionally uninvolved with no set rules, fared about the same as kids raised by permissive parents.

The study covered 872 children who were part of a group enrolled at birth in 1991 in a U.S. government study and followed for a number of years.

"Among the four parenting styles, authoritarian parenting was associated with the highest risk of overweight among young children," concluded the study published in the June issue of "Pediatrics," the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

"These results provide evidence that a strict environment lacking in emotional responsiveness is associated with an increased risk of childhood overweight," the study said.

It may be that strict parents have defined limits on when and what their children eat that could have a negative impact if not accompanied by warmth and sensitivity, it added.

"A parent who is relatively insensitive to the child's emotional needs and development may impose a structure, such as requiring that a child clean his or her plate, that results in learning to eat on the basis of external cues rather than internal cues," the report said.

In addition, if a parent demands that a child exercise, it may result in an aversion to exercise, it said.

And living in a home with high expectations for self control but little sensitivity can be stressful, it added, and overeating can become "a stress response."

But after decades of focusing their attentions skyward, the Meinels - now in their 80s - are grappling with a question that seems, at first light, to be far, far away from astronomy. Namely: Why did modern humans and other species emerge some 40,000 years ago?

Their answer: Cosmic radiation, which the Meinels will elaborate on June 20 in a noon public lecture at the University of San Diego, part of the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"Paleoanthropologists kind of gasp at the idea," said Aden. "The idea of cosmic rays significantly affecting early hominids and other species is pretty dramatic, but there's some really compelling evidence to support the idea. It's a totally new factor to be considered."

Distinguished careers

Coming from almost anyone else, the suggestion that a burst of cosmic radiation profoundly mutated life on Earth and altered the course of human evolution would probably be dismissed as outrageous science fiction.

But Aden and Marjorie Meinel have been both serious and significant players in astronomy for a good chunk of the last century. Natives of Pasadena, they met in a special 11th grade class for gifted students at Pasadena Junior College. Both were interested in space science. Marjorie's interest was inherited: Her father, Edison Pettit, was one of the founding astronomers of the 102-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory, east of Los Angeles. Aden's interest evolved over time. It began as an apprentice in Mount Wilson's optics shop, through a stint in the Navy as a rocket engineer and at the California Institute of Technology, where his doctoral dissertation eventually resulted in the world's first solid Schmidt spectrograph - a device for measuring and charting wavelengths of light in space.

With Marjorie serving as adviser, editor and muse (and mother to their seven children), Aden launched a career designing, developing and directing observatories around the world. He helped establish the first national observatory at Kitt Peak, southwest of Tucson, Ariz., in the 1960s, then moved to Steward Observatory and taught at the University of Arizona. At various times, he helped build telescopes in India and China. In the 1980s, he and Marjorie moved to the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena where they helped launch space-based telescopes like the Hubble. Aden retired in 1993, Marjorie in 2000.

So how does a distinguished astronomer become interested in human evolution?

"Frankly, when you retire, you finally have time to read and think a lot, said Aden. "When that happens, questions pop up, sometimes right out of the blue."

As a high school student, Aden had participated in some balloon experiments at Cal Tech to study cosmic radiation, which were utterly mysterious at the time but are now known to consist of high energy particles (including protons) emanating from sources in outer space and bombarding the planet from every direction.

While reading a story about ice-core research, Aden wondered whether the core samples also contained information about cosmic radiation levels over the Earth's history. To his and Marjorie's surprise, an examination of existing ice core data showed a significant surge in radiation roughly 40,000 years ago - about the same time, they noted, that modern humans emerged in Eurasia, and numerous other species in the northern hemisphere were either undergoing significant change or disappearing altogether.

"That's when we first became tempted to put two and two together," said Aden. "If there was a large surge of cosmic rays, and there's good evidence that these rays can (cause mutations), the question becomes, did they help create new species of life?

"Our findings indicate that two very rare occurrences happened at roughly the same time, which suggests that how we've evolved might not be just slow, random mutation and natural selection. Maybe we are partly the product of cosmic radiation."

The Meinels even have a likely source for the radiation: the gaseous remains of a dying star called the Cat's Eye nebula discovered by William Herschel in 1786.

According to their hypothesis, the nebula began emitting a burst of radiation roughly 200,000 years ago. "Around the time that Neanderthals began to appear," said Aden.

Approximately 40,000 years ago, the frequency and intensity of the radiation surged, spawning in the Meinels' view, a host of evolutionary changes. "Then, about 10,000 years ago, the Earth passed out of the nebula's jet of cosmic rays, ending the accelerated mutations," said Aden.

Insufficient data

But is the nebula's radiation truly the cause or simply an intriguing correlation? Aden and Marjorie don't know. They expect their ideas to be questioned and scrutinized. Indeed, they demand it.

"During World War II, I edited articles on rocketry," said Marjorie. "I had to be absolutely accurate in my descriptions and details or things could blow up. I've always believed that you have to get the science exactly right, with nothing misunderstood."

Both say that much more research needs to be done, that the ice cores are just a clue. But Aden is optimistic that he and his wife have noticed something overlooked by others, something significant.

He recalls attending a conference at UC Berkeley in 1980 when Luis Alvarez, the Nobel physicist, and his geologist son, Walter, first proposed the theory that a massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago spurred the extinction of dinosaurs.

Though widely accepted now, the Alvarez' asteroid-impact theory was initially dismissed by many scientists as folly. Aden thinks his cosmic ray idea will also require time (and more proof) to become accepted.

"We're describing a creation event, the impetus behind new species emerging," said Aden. "People who are well-established don't like to change their minds, and this requires a big change in thinking. That's why Marjorie and I like giving public lectures, especially to young people who are more likely to have open minds.

"I doubt either of us will be around to see how all of this works out. We just hope others will find what we've discovered exciting enough to pursue."

The basic phenomenon usually involves a young child who talks about the memories of another (adult) person in first-person perspective. In some cases there are predictions or announcing dreams made, respectively by the older person before death and the mother of the child, predicting the transfer of personal identity.

Also involved may be unusual play, behavior patterns, specific phobias, and birthmarks/birth defects specifically related to the life and death of the previous personality. Such cases have been found in many parts of the world; the most striking cases involve memories that can be (and in many cases were) checked against independent sources and shown to correspond to an actual deceased person. The far majority of these cases describe ordinary lives (not famous individuals, as often occurs through "past life recall therapy"), as well as violent deaths resulting from accidents or various crimes.

The investigation of such cases, as described in this book, is carried out in a methodical and impartial manner. The only view that the book assumes is that there is a phenomenon here worthy of study, and that seems amply proven. The text is fairly neutral about the interpretation of the data and indeed goes into considerable detail about the methodology (interviews and fact-checking) as well as possible pitfalls of individual cases. The author is very good about suggesting possible conclusions that might be drawn and discussing their relative merits. Clearly the most immediate thing that comes to mind is a classical notion of reincarnation, but the book discusses a number of possible alternatives that must also be considered. Accepting that, one is left with a variety of further questions, such as why only some people seem to have such recall, why the recall generally ceases at 5-6 years of age, why the birthmark cases almost always involve the skin, why the deaths almost always involve violence, etc.

Chapter 3 focuses on "explanations to consider", including super-PSI, possession, etc., which while hardly being more palatable explanations for conventional scientists, need to be evaluated. Interestingly, while these alternatives are discussed in detail, along with both scientific and religious objections to reincarnation, the book does not spend time unpacking the notion of reincarnation, or exactly what it means for a "person" to be identified with another person. The philosophical (ontological as well as epistemological) issues surrounding personal identity are complex (see the works of Anthony Flew), and quite germane to this discussion [Glover, 1976; Morick, 1970; Perry, 1975; Perry, 1978]. While the data will be convincing to many readers, it would be a mistake to think that accepting reincarnation as the most likely explanation for these observations gets us past many of the difficulties with personal identity and the meaning of "memory" which have plagued philosophy of mind for millennia.

As an example, consider the fact that the concept of "person" has undergone a radical deconstruction by recent advances in cognitive science. Evidence from a number of areas of psychology, biology, and artificial intelligence suggests that there is no unified "I" even in living individuals! The author asks (p. 215), "what is it that reincarnates?". A first question might be, "what is it that is incarnated now?". The currently most-popular notion of human cognition treats the self as a fiction, or a "center of narrative gravity", while the behavior and perceptions of a human being are the result of a number of information processing modules that vie for control [Braude, 1995; Dennett, 1980; Dennett, 1991; Marks, 1981; Marks, 1978; White, 1991]. These modules are made up nested hierarchies of increasingly "dumb" information-processing systems, ultimately merging with specific neuronal pathways in the brain. It is clear that we are moving away from the notion of a centralized Ghost in the Machine who supervises the whole operation; if this view is even partially correct, it challenges us to develop more sophisticated notions of what might reincarnate and how, assuming we believe that something related to human cognition might survive the death of the body.

The author proposes the analogy of TV signal to TV set, to explicate the relationship between mind and body. As the television apparatus is needed for the signal to be expressed, the mind is not originated by the brain but rather is "transmitted" through it. This offers dualists a way to explain why the brain is necessary but not sufficient. Pull out the right wires, and there's no TV program on, but not because the program has disappeared. On this view, the information content of the show is not in the wires of the TV set. The analogy is appealing, but dangerous. The main problem is that it only explains the simplest cases-a bullet through the brain 5 no human behavior. However, neuroscience now has a huge amount of data showing how very subtle and primary aspects of our personality do indeed depend upon the structure and function of the brain. Through work with psychotropic compounds, accidents or disease which causes specific kinds of damage, and genetic mutation in animal systems, it seems that this simple analogy must be fleshed out much more before it can do useful work. Many wonderful examples have now been reported [Sacks, 1998]. A particular kind of damage can cause a man not to be able to name red vegetables, or to cause him to believe and claim vehemently that his left arm does not belong to him. Does that really jibe with the brain being just a transmitter? Not in any simple fashion. If, when one pulls out a certain transistor, the TV show does not stop but rather shows the protagonist start to walk on his hands for the rest of the program, one starts to suspect that some important aspect of the fundamental information content was indeed directly related to the hardware that was removed.

These issues directly point to the reason why this work is so important. While many people are personally excited at the prospect of reincarnation, it is unclear that this possesses that kind of general import for most of us. First, the data do not show that everyone reincarnates; at face value, it suggests that perhaps only those with particular kinds of deaths may do so. Even if all of us do, the far majority will have no recollection of it, dampening the excitement about the prospect (shades of Philosophy-101 again: is the situation where you are reborn but do not know about it, really any different from one where you simply die and another person is born, and does it matter to "you" now?). In any case, it would seem that one's focus ought to be in the current life, and not on the past lives (as suggested in the book section dealing with how to ease the psychological issues confronting children with these kinds of memories). If we don't remember our past lives, there's probably a good reason for it. Nor do there appear to be any societal benefits stemming from an acceptance of rebirth and even karma; as pointed out in the book, there are just as many villains in countries where this is commonly-accepted fact as there are in the Western world.

The biggest import of this work is for basic science and the understanding of the universe as a whole. More profoundly than most of the work on psychokinesis, telepathy, and so on, which at least can be approached with physicalist theories [White and Krippner, 1977], the prospect of personal survival of bodily death speaks against the doctrine of materialism [Beloff, 1985; Beloff, 1990]. The author discusses a couple of related phenomena that do the same (veridical out-of-body experiences) and touches on relevant aspects of parapsychology, such as the mind-machine interaction work [Jahn and Dunne, 1987]. It is clear that if the human personality is not simply a by-product of the biology of the body, a drastic revision in our basic sciences will be required. A brief discussion of the issues (problems with conservation of mass/energy, quantum approaches by people like Stapp, etc.) is appropriately included. Interested readers can learn more about these issues from [Popper and Eccles, 1983].

Indeed, the intersection of this body of work with mainstream science provides some important puzzles. The author rightly points out that it is entirely unclear how (in the case of birthmarks, if they were caused by the beliefs and wishes of the mother instead of by reincarnation) information acquired by the mother might affect the genetics of embryonic development. This is true, although it is of course equally unclear how the information content of a discarnate spirit can affect the embryogenesis of a human fetus. A couple of the most interesting cases revealed information from the children about how they "chose" their prospective parents. This immediately presents a thought experiment. Suppose one takes a human egg, fertilizes it in vitro, and waits until it makes its first division into a 2-celled embryo. This is done today routinely in IVF clinics around the world. One then tosses a coin (or if you prefer, uses a quantum random number generator). If it comes up heads, one implants the embryo as is, and one child results. If it comes up tails, one separates the 2 cells and implants them individually, which will result in the birth of twins - two different individuals. The procedure from coin toss to splitting can be done on the time-scale of a minute. Assuming the "decisions" about picking one's parents are performed in a world where time is relevant (and it would seem that a "decision" process assumes a linear flow of time), when in such a case does a spirit get assigned to the twin which would not exist if the coin comes up heads?

As long as we're talking about biology (and certainly this work, and the works of Stevenson, contribute to biology in an important way), I am tempted to add to the "Future Research" section (p. 231) and describe a potential area of experimental research that at least begins to address these questions in a rigorous manner. It turns out that there is a type of worm that can regenerate (re-grow) its head (including brain etc.) if it is cut off. These worms can also be trained to perform simple tasks - they have memories and remember. Some truly astounding work in the 1970s (which is now being pursued in our lab) has shown that if trained worms are cut up, and the tails are allowed to form a new worm (with a new brain), the resulting worm remembers the original training [McConnell, 1965]. This work demonstrates that (assuming the memory is in the body at all) knowledge and information can be stored outside of the brain. While this example doesn't take us all the way to a discarnate entity, and may or may not apply to higher vertebrates, it provides a foot-hold to begin, giving biologists an experimentally tractable entry-point into the process of how information could be imposed on a forming brain from outside the brain.

The book does not describe any cases not supportive of 1:1 relationships between deceased personalities and children (for example, cases where the original personality was still alive while the child was born, or two children who remember the same previous life). Such were (as a minority) described in the larger Stevenson books, and represent interesting cases which might also teach us much. Clearly, lots of work remains to be done. Besides continued collection of cases, one wishes for more experimental approaches, such as the described marks purposefully made at the time of death that can help identify possible rebirths if they occur in the same family. A number of children apparently also made statements about their conditions between lives, and it is hoped that continued questioning of such children might reveal interesting details about the process.

The author has not only produced a first-rate piece of research, but also has shown the necessary very wide-ranging knowledge to help the reader make sense of it. This work is incredibly important, and the author is clearly doing it the right way. The coding of all cases into a searchable computer database is an important advance, as it will allow a significant amount of data-mining-a technique which allows, given large data sets, to automatically find and derive relationships and hypotheses which were not specifically anticipated. For example the author describes the test for a correlation between "saintliness" in the previous life and the societal position of the next personality. For those who have never heard of this fascinating work, this is a good introduction and describes a number of informative cases. For those who have, the book includes plenty of discussions of related topics and will surely cause the reader to ponder important issues. I recommend this book. Interested readers will also want to read a number of the works of Ian Stevenson, the originator of this field [Stevenson, 1997a; Stevenson, 1997b].
References

1. Beloff, J. (1985). Parapsychology and radical dualism. Journal of Religious & Psychical Research 8, 3-10.
2. Beloff, J. (1990). Could there be a physical explanation for PSI? In: The Relentless Question: Reflections on the Paranormal. McFarland, Jefferson, NC.
3. Braude, S. (1995). First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
4. Dennett, D. (1980). Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind & Psychology. MIT Press.
5. Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Co.
6. Glover, J. (1976). The Philosophy of Mind. Oxford University Press.
7. Jahn, R. G., and Dunne, B. J. (1987). Margins of Reality: the Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
8. Marks, C. E. (1981). Commissurotomy, Consciousness, and Unity of Mind. MIT Press.
9. Marks, L. E. (1978). The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations among the Modalities. New York: Academic Press.
10. McConnell, J. V. (1965). The Worm Re-turns: The Best from the Worm Runner's Digest. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
11. Morick, H. (1970). Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind: Readings from Descartes to Strawson. Glenview, Ill: Scott Foresman.
12. Perry, J. (1975). Personal Identity. University of California Press.
13. Perry, J. (1978). A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Hackett Pub. Co.
14. Popper, K. R., and Eccles, J. C. (1983). The Self and Its Brain. Routledge & K. Paul, London; Boston.
15. Sacks, O. (1998). The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Simon & Schuster.
16. Stevenson, I. (1997a). Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. Praeger.
17. Stevenson, I. (1997b). Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. Praeger.
18. White, J., and Krippner, S. (1977). Future Science: Life Energies & the Physics of Paranormal Phenomena. Doubleday.
19. White, S. L. (1991). The Unity of the Self. MIT Press.

The Commission said the Group of Eight, made up of the world's richest countries, must back a $300 million, 10-year action plan to address the issue in developing countries.

Robertson said it needed the same attention from the G8 as was given to the "Make Poverty History" campaign, which lobbied political leaders to write off billions of dollars of debt owed by the world's poorest nations.

"In 2005 millions of people, and the leaders of the G8, responded to the call to Make Poverty History," Robertson said in a statement.

"Yet the gains for development won in 2005 will be at risk if action is not taken to reverse the growing epidemic of road traffic death and injury, with its terrible human and economic cost."

The report said that despite causing death on a similar scale to malaria and TB, road safety was not included in the Millennium Development Goals and so received far less in overseas funding.

It estimated that the economic cost to low and middle income countries was $65-100 billion.

Robertson called for "political leadership" from the G8 along with a significant increase in resources.

The commission's findings will be presented to world leaders before the G8 summit in St Petersburg in July in an effort to have road safety put on the agenda of future summits.

The report also called for a United Nations Road Safety Summit to be called to coordinate an international policy for preventing road injuries.

"Five hundred children are dying every say and thousands more are being disabled or injured," said Formula One driver Michael Schumacher, a member of the commission set up by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) Foundation.

Rick Ueno, general manager of the Sheraton Chicago Hotel, said the program which began on Wednesday grew out of his own personal BlackBerry addiction. His one-step recovery was switching to a regular cell phone.

"I was really addicted to my BlackBerry. I had an obsession with e-mail," he told Reuters. "Morning and night. There came a time when I didn't think it was healthy ... I quit cold turkey."

He believes guests might want to try the same thing for a day or two anyway, so they can concentrate on meetings, business and socializing while at the hotel.

Ueno said he would take personal charge of any BlackBerrys or related devices guests want to surrender and place them in his office locked up until their return is requested. There is no charge.

"I run a hotel with over 900 employees and thousands of guests. I think I'm more effective. I feel better. I sleep better. My family likes it," he said of his post-BlackBerry life.

The popular hand-held devices, sometimes called "CrackBerries" because users become so reliant on them, are made by Canadian-based Research In Motion Ltd..