Neuroethics

Tremendous advances in neuroscience, along with the attention that the “Decade of the Brain” in the 1990s brought to them, sparked heightened focus on public awareness of brain research. An already fast-paced field was met with new demands on innovation and discovery. Along with progress in genomics, molecular medicine and other disciplines, new windows were opened on to the understanding of many brain disorders such as depression, addiction, and dementia, and hope for new interventions realized. Today, we are poised
to launch a new decade – one focused on mind – and with all the complexity that the notion of mind brings forth, the implications of new research in neuroscience for individuals, society, and culture are profound:

How shall society respond as a better understanding of brain biology changes fundamental perceptions of self, moral responsibility, and beliefs?

What guidelines are needed to manage staggering, and potentially
life-endangering, increases in the use of medicines for children diagnosed with new or poorly understood variants of attention and mood disorders?

What policies are needed to respond to a diversion of already scarce medical resources from quality and respectful care for the elderly?

How will our privacy be protected in an ever-expanding information age? What hope can we expect from progress, and what should we fear?

It is at this juncture of ethics, human values, and neuroscience that neuroethics plays its critical role. Neuroethics is a relatively new discipline that has deep roots in ancient philosophical discussions of mind and brain, and has joined this history with contemporary thinking in biomedical ethics and neuroscience.

Many issues in neuroethics have the same starting points as other fields of bioethics – predicting disease, dealing with unexpected findings and unintended consequences of research, drawing attention to areas of potential concern. Neuroethics, though, is distinguished by wrestling with challenges that probe and touch us most deeply: free will, personal responsibility, personhood, and more. Diversity of culture and language, gender and ethnicity, also all factor into the equation of what defines brain health versus brain disease, risk versus benefit, acceptable versus unacceptable. The task, therefore, is to close the gap between the traditionally lagging consideration of the ethical and social implications of frontier brain technology, and the development of the technology itself.

At the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we focus on high impact areas of neuroethics. These include, for example, tackling the ethical challenges of:

• predicting devastating dementias that affect cognition and personality
• identifying signs of consciousness in patients with severe brain injury
• “peering” into the brain of individuals to assess guilt or innocence
• commercializing drugs and devices prematurely
• assuring justice in health care.

As neuroscience advances to define and redefine how we think and why, it will most assuredly take us out of our comfort zone. Neuroethics addresses all these zones - personal, cultural and societal – so that we may better understand
where neurobiology intersects with human values, and use those insights to help shape and empower both neuroscience and science policy of the future.

Some relevant links:

http://neuroethics.ubc.ca
http://neuroethics.stanford.edu
http://neuroethics.ca
http://neuroethicssociety.org

Some key publications:

Illes, J. (Ed.) Neuroethics: Defining the Issues in Theory, Practice and Policy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, 2006.

Illes, J., Kirschen, M.P., Edwards, E., Stanford, L.R., Bandettini, P., Michael, D.B., Ford, P.J., Glover, G.H., Kulynych, J., Macklin R., Wolf, S.M., and the Working Group on Incidental Findings, Incidental findings in brain imaging research. Science, 2006, 311,783-784.

Illes, J., DeVries, R., Cho, M.K., Schraedley-Desmond, P. ELSI priorities for brain imaging. American Journal of Bioethics, 2006, 6(2), 24-31.
Eaton, M. and Illes, J. Commercializing cognitive neurotechnology – the ethical terrain. Nature Biotechnology, 2007, 25(4), 1-5.

Illes, J. Empirical neuroethics. EMBO/EBML J., 2007, 8, S57-S61.