Monitoring and Manipulating Brain Function: New Neuroscience Technologies and Their Ethical Implications

Abstract

Congress christened 1990s the decade of brain, and this was apt from vantage point of early 21st Century. Great strides were made in both and clinical neuroscience. What current decade may, in retrospect, be remembered for is growth of neuroscience beyond those two categories, basic and clinical, into a host of new applications. From measurement of mental processes with functional neuroimaging to their manipulation with ever more selective drugs, new capabilities of neuroscience raise unprecedented ethical and social issues. These issues must be identified and addressed if society is to benefit from neuroscience revolution now in progress. Like field of genetics, cognitive neuroscience raises questions about biological foundations of who we are. Indeed, relation of self and personal identity to brain is, if anything, more direct than that of self to genome. In addition, ethical questions of neuroscience are more urgent, as neural interventions are currently more easily accomplished than genetic interventions. Yet compared to field of molecular genetics, in which ethical issues have been at forefront since days of 1975 Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA, relatively little attention has been paid to ethics of neuroscience. This situation is changing, as bioethicists and neuroscientists are beginning to explore emerging social and ethical issues raised by progress in neuroscience. In Society for Neuroscience's recently formulated mission statement, bioethical issues figure prominently. (1) Numerous articles, meetings, and symposia have appeared on subject. (2) The term neuroethics, which originally referred to bioethical issues in clinical neurology, has now been adopted to refer to ethical issues in technological advances of neuroscience more generally. (3) (Unfortunately, term is also used to refer to neural bases of ethical thinking, a different topic. (4)) Neuroethics encompasses a broad and varied set of bioethical issues. Some are similar to those that have arisen previously in biomedicine, such as safety of new research and treatment methods, rationing of promising new therapies, and predictive testing for future illnesses when no cure is available (as with Alzheimer's or Huntington's disease). Other neuroethical issues, however, are unique to neuroscience because of particular subject matter of that field. The brain is organ of mind and consciousness, locus of our sense of selfhood. Interventions in brain therefore have different ethical implications than interventions in other organs. In addition, our growing knowledge of mind-brain relations is likely to affect our definitions of competence, mental health and illness, and death. Our moral and legal conceptions of responsibility are likewise susceptible to change as our understanding of physical mechanisms of behavior evolves. Our sense of privacy and confidentiality of our own thought processes may also be threatened by technologies that can reveal neural correlates of our innermost thoughts. Many of new social and ethical issues in neuroscience result from one of two developments. The first is ability to monitor brain function in living humans with a spatial and temporal resolution sufficient to capture psychologically meaningful fluctuations of activity. The second is ability to alter brain with chemical or anatomical selectivity that is sufficient to induce specific functional changes. For each of these developments, we will review advances in enabling technology and provide examples of ethically challenging uses of technology and an analysis of ethical issues they raise. Neuroimaging The history of modern brain imaging began in 1970s with computed axial tomography or CAT scans and proceeded at a rapid and accelerating rate for remaining decades of twentieth century. …