The Dalai Lama will speak at this year's annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) despite a petition calling for the lecture to be cancelled.

Campaigners had collected more than 500 signatures in protest against the talk, which they presented to the society's president, Carol Barnes, on 15 August.

The Dalai Lama had been invited to speak at November's meeting in Washington on the effects of meditation on the brain. But some neuroscientists said that a talk by the Buddhist leader was inappropriate at an academic meeting (see Nature 436, 452; 2005). Others accused the Dalai Lama of spreading religious ideas under the guise of scientific research into meditation.

Four days after meeting the protesters, Barnes notified one of the petition's organizers, Bai Lu, a neuroscientist at the US National Institutes of Health, that the lecture would go ahead as planned.

The talk will be the first in a new series of lectures called “dialogues between neuroscience and society”. Joe Carey, public information director for the SfN, says that the society's leadership “continues to believe that the original plan and purpose of the dialogues series makes sense, and that the first two invited speakers are consistent with the intent”. The Dalai Lama's talk will be followed by one from architect Frank Gehry at the society's 2006 meeting in New Orleans.

Six abstracts for this year's meeting have been withdrawn by one SfN member in protest against the lecture. But since the controversy became public, the society says that it has received a lot of e-mails on the issue, nearly all of them in favour of the talk.

The president's decision, says Carey, will be the society's final word on the issue.