Interesting controversy rages around plans for the Dalai Lama to address the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting about the research in which he is collaborating on the cognitive effects of meditation practice. Over five hundred researchers have signed a petition urging the lecture be canceled, fearing the loss of credibility to the field because “it will highlight a subject with largely unsubstantiated claims and compromised scientific rigor and objectivity.” Supporters of the Dalai Lama say that many of the petitioners are of Chinese descent and motivated politically. As a college undergraduate thirty years ago, I was a research assistant to then-graduate student Richard Davidson in his fledgling research into the psychological effects of meditation. Davidson is now the Dalai Lama’s major neuroscientist collaborator and the object of the petitioners’ discontent, partly because he is a meditator himself or, as one of the drafters of the petition puts it, a “declared believer playing a dual role as advocate and researcher,” a characterization which Davidson, quite rightly in my estimation, considers overblown.