Dr. Gabriel is professor at the U.S. Army War College, a retired Army Colonel and former intelligence officer, the author of more than 30 books and former consultant to the Department of Combat Psychiatry at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He believes the secret pharmaceutical program at the heart of Perfect Killer may bring death and casualties on an unprecedented scale.

In addition, there are indications that a drug such as Xantaeus may have been tested on some American troops in the First Gulf War and could be responsible for a variation of Gulf War Syndrome.

A. It didn???t.

Perfect Killer was finished before the case was re-opened. I was much more influenced by the successful re-opening of the Medgar Evers case and by my experience of working for Mississippi Governor Bill Waller (now on the state supreme court) who courageously prosecuted Evers??? assassin twice despite death threats and the immense pressure from the segregationist democratic party apparatus. Despite his courage, the best Waller could get was a hung jury from all-white panels. The fact that the juries hung rather than acquitted is testament to Waller and to the inherent goodness in the hearts of many Mississippi whites.

A. While it annoys literary snobs to no end, the reality is that too few people read "serious" books. So, despite the drumbeat of abuse heaped on popular fiction by snobs and vain intellectuals, genre fiction such as thrillers, mysteries, romances and other "airplane reading" reach far more people and in the end have a far greater influence on society, culture and the inner life of people than books that take themselves too seriously for their own good.

Steven King and Nora Roberts have had a far more lasting effect on American culture and its readers than a 747-load of "important" or "serious" books. This drives the snotty reviewers and critics (redundant, that) totally nuts.

In addition, a stultifying orthodoxy afflicts the "serious" side of any discipline, whether it???s literature, physics or consciousness studies. The defenders of the status quo jealously guard their turf against new ideas and concepts that challenge their view of the field. They have, after all, attained their lofty intellectual positions by supporting and publishing books and papers that bolster their "correct" view of the world. They have much to lose from new ideas.

Without the "right" intellectual perspective ??? their rules, their outlook, their dogma ??? any attempt I might make at a "serious" non-fiction work would probably be rejected by the establishment.

Besides, thrillers are fun to write and fun to read.

A. Yes. The top center for studying this is the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. The leading proponent of quantum consciousness theory are Sir Roger Penrose OM (born August 8 1931), an English mathematical physicist. highly regarded for his work in mathematical physics, cosmology and a key theorist about black holes along with his partner in this, Stephen Hawking.

A. Because intentionality, the ability to make a choice and the necessity of living with the consequences of choice underpin all of human relations from marriage and friendship to the criminal justice system. Additionally, the politically correct yet scientifically incorrect notions of orthodox biology and psychology have undermined the significance of free will and personal responsibility. Just as classical Newtonian physics has been proven wrong so many times by quantum physics, I wanted to set the record straight with regard to free will and how the old, classical view has been supplanted by the new.

A. Because we learn so much about something when things go wrong. And because we are fascinated and horrified when serious things go wrong with our minds. With other animals and systems, we can intentionally tinker with things, alter a part of a system and study the effects to see what it does. This is obviously not ethical to do with human beings. Thus, volumes have been written about various mental, perception and consciousness issues all deduced from damage to particular areas of the brain.

In addition, one of the theories in Perfect Killer is that we are all incapacitated in some way or another in our ability to perceive, think and decide. In other words, our brains (the meatware) are analogous to computer hardware. We all have different hardware configurations that vary from one person to another in their ability to perform specific functions. Thoughts, motivations and the decision-making process are like software which will run better on some meatware and worse on others.

This concept is why I chose a spectrum of mental dysfunctions. The spectrum allowed me to explore the implications of decisions made by each character and how each character was able or unable to overcome their own meatware limitations in making decisions.

If Penrose and Hameroff and others in the field of quantum consciousness are correct, our consciousness derives from and has quantum connection to the space-time continuum ??? the very fabric of the universe and of reality itself.

Q. Is there scientific evidence for free will?

A. Absolutely. A new form of psychotherapy, known as cognitive behavior therapy, has begun to break through the stone walls of psychiatric orthodoxy and the current drug-oriented treatment dogma.

The therapy goes beyond traditional "on the couch" talking therapy and requires a person to deal with their depression, anger, urges etc. by identifying thought patterns and assumptions ("I???m a bad parent;" "I don???t do well on tests.") then begin cognitively disputing those assumptions and to initiate physical actions that keep themselves from brooding over those negative assumptions.

In other words, people are thinking their way out of psychological jams rather than popping a pill. Studies at Harvard and other institutions have shown that CBT shows a recovery rate at least equal to pharmaceuticals but with a significant difference: CBT therapy has a more lasting effect than drugs like Prozac. CBT can be a "permanent" cure because it actually changes the physical configuration of the brain ??? growth of new synapses ??? and does so in more than one area of the brain whereas drugs work on one specific area and are effective only so long as the person continues to take them.

Obviously CBT represents a serious threat to the multi-billion dollar markets of the big pharmaceutical companies.

Perhaps more importantly, CBT offers confirmation that a person can "will themselves well," and offers evidence that pure thought can be self directed through conscious decision and that ethereal "thought" can produce a direct physical effect.

This disturbs the mainstream of neuroscience which believes that consciousness and all resulting thoughts are accidental or incidental byproducts of the web of electrical discharges in our brains. Through some as-yet-undefined method of self-referential coherence, the ruling dogma holds that everything is matter and nothing is transcendent. This, of course, comes from a classical physics standpoint which has been proven incorrect so often by quantum physics.

A. To begin with, studying consciousness is a lot like studying quanta: any observation of the system ??? whether a person???s consciousness or a photon -- changes the system. This means that we can observe the results of an observation, but we cannot actually know with certainty what the state of the system was prior to our observation.

The past fifty years has shown us that the classical notions of physics formulated by Newton and expanded upon in subsequent systems may look good to us and comply with "common sense" but that they are simply "pretty good" approximations that do not accurately reflect the true nature of matter, energy and reality.

If classical physics is all we had to work with, we would not have semiconductors, solar cells, global positioning satellites, lasers, CD players, personal computers, modern medical imaging like MRIs and PET scans or any of the other of thousands of technological devices we take for granted.

Yet those who study consciousness and behavior still hew to the old, disreputable notions of classical science that have been proven wrong for so very long. They do this because it "seems logical" to them. But the well-proven principles of quantum physics show that the universe is a weird and counterintuitive place where matter and energy are both waves, particles and sometimes neither, where matter is energy is matter and neither really exists except as a yet-undetermined function of the space-time continuum. In the strange world of quantum physics, a particle can be in two places at the same time; the actual state of a system can ever be determined with absolute certainty; and an action on an entangled particle here, can result in an instantaneous chance in another particle, there ??? even if there is a million miles away.

If this counterintuitive maze doesn???t make sense to you, you???re in good company. Nobel Laureate and renowned physicist Richard Feynman said that "Anybody who says they understand quantum physics is either lying or crazy."

Albert Einstein never got comfortable with quantum physics. He called quantum entanglement "spooky action at a distance" and insisted the inevitable uncertainties could not be right because "God doesn???t play dice."

Einstein was wrong. Quantum physics proves that God does play dice. However an increasing body of research into quantum consciousness indicates that we get to roll those dice a lot of the time and that could be the foundation of free will.

A. The biologists and chemists hate the intrusion of physicists into the investigation of consciousness, but the reality is that everything is physics. A biological system ??? whether it???s a turnip or a human brain ??? is a mass of molecules, sustained and energized by energy either from the sun or the chemical bonds in other molecules. This fits into the category of biochemistry which is simply chemistry applied to biological systems.

Chemistry for its part, is nothing more than the physics of how atoms behave when they connect or disconnect with each other.

Atoms connect and disconnect with each other according to how their electron orbitals interact and this is determined by quantum physics. These electrons, which many people think of as "solid" particles, are actually some undefined wave or possibly string-like phenomenon. This holds also for the supposedly solid protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus.

Biology = biochemistry = chemistry = electron bonding = quantum physics.

Everything is physics and the foundation of all physics is quantum physics.