Divinity Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.
Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields, 1 selected
Showing 1 of 608 questions, filtered to 1 specialty.
Measurement 1
A quantity nobody has pinned down closely enough to settle the matter.
Iboga
Does ibogaine interrupt opioid dependence, and at what risk?
Open Iboga
Why It Is Open Reported since 1962 and repeated many times in unregulated clinics, but the evidence base is weak. Rigorous trials have been slow, partly because the compound is controlled in many jurisdictions and partly because a treatment given once does not fit the commercial model that funds drug development. Meanwhile ibogaine is cardiotoxic, prolongs the QT interval, and deaths have occurred where screening was absent.
What Would Settle It Adequately powered controlled trials with cardiac monitoring. The question is included here rather than left to medicine because the answer bears on the plant: demand from outside Gabon is already driving overharvesting of wild stands of a slow growing species that a religion depends on.
Expertise Needed Pharmacology, addiction medicine, cardiology, conservation biology
Question posed in
Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa, James W. Fernandez.