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EDITORIAL Neuroscience and Neuroethics
CREDIT: LESTER LEFKOWITZ/CORBIS
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euroethics, it appears, is a subject that has “arrived.” The Dana Foundation is, for the second time since 2002, sponsoring a special lecture on this topic at this year’s annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. AAAS, publisher of Science, also joined with Dana to produce a conference on “Neuroscience and the Law” earlier this year. The U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics is now devoting serious attention to the topic. Companies are deploying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map brain activity as they assess the product preferences of prospective consumers (Coke or Pepsi?). There’s even a new discipline called neuroeconomics. So something is going on here. What got it started, and where is it headed? I think it emerged as new techniques and insights into human brain function gave us a dramatically revised notion of what might be possible. The first microelectrode recordings in active, behaving, nonhuman primates made it possible to look seriously at how valuation, choice, and expectation are encoded by single cells in particular parts of the brain. It further evolved with the development of fMRI and other noninvasive techniques for tracing neural activity in people. These studies are beginning to explain how particular brain structures are involved in higher functions (making difficult moral choices, for example) or in predisposing the individual to a particular kind of behavior. In a different area, the successes of psychopharmacology in altering brain states and behavior have raised new problems of their own, not least in terms of how we may feel about the chemical manipulation of innate capacities. The list is long and ever growing: antidepressants, methylphenidate (Ritalin) for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), compounds that enhance alertness, and a new wa