The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects From Cambridge University Press

Product Description

The last twenty years have seen huge advances in our understanding of how the brain works. Researchers are now trying to understand the nature of consciousness itself. This collection represents an accessible attempt to expose and question research boundaries of what is ethically, socially and legally acceptable in neuroscience research.
Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #1068827 in Books
* Published on: 2004-12-06
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 316 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Scientific American
What are the legal, ethical and moral implications of research in "the new brain sciences"? Rees and Rose, two distinguished British academics, invited the contributors to this collection of essays to ask hard questions about these subjects. Their answers will make you stop and think. You might hope, for example, that decades of progress in psychiatry and psychology would be helping courts assess guilt, innocence and appropriate punishments. But contributor Stephen Sedley, a British judge who spent six years presiding over homicide cases, finds experts to be of little value. He admires the jury system because "of the rapidity with which twelve lay people were generally able to grasp and apply to a live problem before them principles of law." As for the testimony of psychiatrists, however, he says that he and the jury are typically left "peering into a very deep pool indeed with very little help about what was to be found there." Perhaps the most visible of the new brain sciences is psychopharmacology, which has brought us drugs now taken by millions of people every day. John Cornwell, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, writes from a courtroom in Louisville, Ky., describing a jury faced with "Prozac on trial."

Weeks of neuroscientists' testimony left them baffled when they had to decide the case of a workplace killer who was on the antidepressant. But it is the elementary schoolroom, not the courtroom, that is the scene of today's largest-scale experiment in psychopharmacology. Over 2 percent of American schoolchildren now receive medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, writes Paul Cooper, a teacher and psychologist. "Medication should not be the default mode," he notes, yet increasingly it is, and in many cases, the drug serves to "treat" children who merely "experience difficulty conforming to the kinds of behavioral expectations that are common in schools." Yet these thorny issues pale next to vexing medical issues that the new brain research may raise. Readers are reminded that a neurologist won a Nobel Prize in 1949 for pioneering the lobotomy and that between the 1940s and 1960s surgeons cavalierly severed critical brain tissue in thousands of patients. Yadin Dudai, an Israeli neurobiologist, decries what he calls a new "lobotomy attitude" in neuroscience today, with researchers working toward "genetic manipulations, brain transplantations, even neurosilicon hybrids." He counsels "humbleness and patience" in view of how little we yet understand.

Jonathan Beard

Review
"Selected from two international conferences, the papers are remarkable for their high quality in substance and style. It is hard to think of anyone who would not have some interest in this work." CHOICE May 2005

About the Author
Sir Dai Rees is Knight Bachelor, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and a founding Fellow of the Royal Academy of Medicine. He was President of theEuropean Science Foundation (1993-1999) and Secretary and Chief Executive of the UK Medical Research Council (1987-1996). He has now retired. Professor Steven Rose has been Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group at the Open University since the inception of the university in 1969. His research focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory.
Customer Reviews

The Perils and Promise of a Neuroscience in Every Aspect of Life5
This is a fascinating book that has been assembled by two of the intellectual powerhouses of British medicine and biology.

In the introduction, Steven Rose, who has been a Professor of Biology and Director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at the Open University since 1969, calls the neurosciences "that final terra incognita, the nature of consciousness itself." He proposes that developments in neurology, molecular biology and other neurosciences have been isolated from their sociological and economic context and have instead been dominated by a reductionist search for quick genetic and pharmacological quick solutions.

The book is based on two meetings that explored neuroscience and neuroethics and it is divided into five sections and sixteen chapters followed by a good list of references and potted biographies of the authors.

Part I. Introduction: The new brain sciences: Stephen Rose

Part II. Freedom to Change
1. Do we ever really act?: Mary Midgley
2. The definition of human nature: Merlin Donald
3. Consciousness and the limits of neurobiology: Hilary Rose
4. Mind metaphors. Neurosciences and ethics: Regine Kollek
5. Genetic and generic determinism. A new threat to free will?: Peter Lipton

Part III. Neuroscience and the Law
6. Human action, neuroscience and the law: Alexander McCall Smith
7. Responsibility and the law: Stephen Sedley
8. Programmed or licensed to kill? The new biology of femicide: Lorraine Radford
9. Genes, responsibility and the law: Patrick Bateson

Part IV. Stewardship of the New Brain Sciences
10. The neurosciences: the danger that we will think we have understood it all: Yadin Dudai
11. On dissecting the genetic basis of behavior and intelligence: Angus Clarke
12. Prospects and perils of stem cell research: a brief guide to current science: Helen Pilcher
13. The use of human embryonic stem cells for research: an ethical evaluation: Guido de Wert
14. The Prozac story: John Cornwell
15. Psychopharmacology at the interface between the market and the new biology: David Healy
16. Education in the age of Ritalin: Paul Cooper

Part V. Conclusion: Dai Rees and Barbro Westerholm

Part II: "Freedom to change," explores the effects of neuroscience on our concepts of human agency, responsibility and free will. The philosopher Mary Midgley asks the most important question: if the true cause of one of our actions is always a physical event in the brain, are we not active agents at all, but more like people hypnotized or possessed by an alien force? The other papers in this section discuss the same issue, without coming to a consensus.

Part III takes these issues as they might inform the law. Although the main focus is on British law, anyone interested in the concepts of legal responsibility will find a treasure trove of interesting and important information here.

In the final chapter, Dai Rees and Barbro Westerholm say that although the philosophical case against free will might seem watertight, it seems to make nonsense of human experience. They say that they "are driven to accept that there must be limitations in a philosophical method which has somehow arrived at the denial of this quality that we value so much."

It seems to me fitting that this should be the last word. Either the philosophical interpretations of the science are wrong and our intuitions about ourselves are correct, or we are all living in a world of delusion. Though it is easy enough to construct intermediate positions, that is what a lot of this work comes down to: do we trust ourselves or throw up our hands and declare that we are nothing but machines at the mercy of our genes and the environment? These are a great deal more than simple academic concerns: our answers will have a major impact on how we see ourselves and treat each other.

Wherever you are in this important debate, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in free will, legal responsibility and the implications of the New Neurosciences.

The only downside of this otherwise superb book is that some of the chapters are in serious need of an editor. That is a shame, but it does little to detract from the importance of this book.

Highly recommended.



Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life