Bioethics and the Brain

Imagine being told at your next physical that a scan of your brain activity indicates a propensity to develop schizophrenia. Now imagaine that your employer and your local government have this information.

New ways of imaging the human brain and developments in microelectronics are providing unprecedented capabilities for monitoring the brain in real time and even for controlling brain function. Electrical activity in the brain can show whether a person is telling the truth. New imaging techniques will allow physicians to detect devastating diseases long before the diseases become clinically apparent. And researchers may, one day, find brain activity that correlates with behavior patterns such as tendencies toward alcoholism, aggression, pedophilia, or racism. But how reliable will the information be, how should it be used, and what will it do to our notion of privacy?

Meanwhile, microelectronics is making access to the brain a two-way street. The same electrical stimulation technologies that allow some of the deaf to hear could one day be fashioned to control behavior as well. Might society be tempted to force behavior-modifying microelectronics on a few citizens to protect many others?

Bioengineer Kenneth R. Foster and biomedical ethicists Paul Root Wolpe and Arthur L. Caplan, all of the University of Pennsylvania, tackle these questions and explain the neuroscience-based technologies that provoke them in "Bioethics and the Brain" in the June issue of IEEE Spectrum. "The consequences of new technologies are hard to predict," they write. Even seemingly benevolent technologies, such as the cochlear implants that allow some deaf people to hear, will certainly bring some negative consequences that cannot be clearly foreseen. A new branch of ethics, termed neuroethics, is emerging to see that society understands the implications of neuroscience and the new devices that it enables. "Even if we can never fully anticipate the impact of employing these technologies," the authors write, "it is important to try."