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

Congress christened the 1990s "the decade of the brain," and this was apt from the vantage point of the early 21st Century. Great strides were made in both basic and clinical neuroscience. What the current decade may, in retrospect, be remembered for is the growth of neuroscience beyond those two categories, "basic" and "clinical," into a host of new applications. From the measurement of mental processes with functional neuroimaging to their manipulation with ever more selective drugs, the new capabilities of neuroscience raise unprecedented ethical and social issues. These issues must be identified and addressed if society is to benefit from the neuroscience revolution now in progress. Like the field of genetics, cognitive neuroscience raises questions about the biological foundations of who we are. Indeed, the relation of self and personal identity to the brain is, if anything, more direct than that of self to the genome. In addition, the ethical questions of neuroscience are more urgent, as neural interventions are currently more easily accomplished than genetic interventions. Yet compared to the field of molecular genetics, in which ethical issues have been at the forefront since the days of the 1975 Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA, relatively little attention has been paid to the ethics of neuroscience.