The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects

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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition. 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

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.

Book Description
The brain is the most complex organ in the body. The last 20 years have seen huge advances in our understanding of how it works and the neurosciences are currently one of the biggest fields of medical research. Researchers are now trying to understand the nature of consciousness itself. However, with discovery comes implication and responsibility. Written at a level accessible to all, this book is an attempt to expose some of these discoveries and question the boundaries of what is ethically, socially and legally acceptable.

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.