![handle is hein.journals/ajbio7 and id is 1 raw text is:
The American Journal of Bioethics, 7(1): 1-2, 2007
Copyright c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1526-5161 print / 1536-0075 online
DOI: 10.1080/15265160601063886
Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est
(Knowledge is Power)
Judy Illes, Stanford University
In July 2006, I co-chaired a symposium called At the Ethi-
cal Frontier of Higher Brain Function Research at the Japan
Neuroscience Society (JNS) meeting in Kyoto, Japan. To-
gether with the other symposium chairs, Osamu Sakura
and Tamami Fukushi, and the panelists, we explored the
history of neuroethics since antiquity, its emergence in pre-
modern and modern days, and the specific challenges that
neuroethics has tackled over the past several years. We dis-
cussed, deliberated and debated the future into which fore-
casted issues could be framed.
Does this sound much like other milestone meetings in
neuroethics? Perhaps. Indeed, we reviewed some familiar
issues such as the need for proactive integration of ethics
into neuroscience protocols (Illes et al. 2006), risks to pri-
vacy in a new age of neuroimaging (Illes and Racine 2005),
and cognitive enhancement with drugs and devices (Farah
and Wolpe 2004). But we also explored still-uncharted terri-
tory. Beyond public engagement, which has been broached
as a first international theme for neuroethics (Illes et al.
2005), we openly spoke about the cross-cultural future for
neuroethics and how health care systems, value and be-
lief systems will factor into neuroethics priorities and the
methods to pursue them (Chen 2006). We engaged in a dis-
cussion of a possible new frontier for animal neuroethics,
hearing proposals for more humane means of acquiring neu-
ral signals using optical imaging techniques rather than con-
ventional electrode implants, achieving motivational effects
using social competition paradigms instead of food depriva-
tion paradigms, and even of a 401K-type retirement plan for
monkeys once their involvement in experiments is complete
(as the alternative is not conducive to their longevity) (Fujii
2006).
In a satellite meeting to the JNS symposium, an office
building conference room in the Otemachi Sankei Plaza of-
fice building in Tokyo held an overflow of people represent-
ing a diverse range of disciplines at the The International
Workshop of Neuroethics in Japan; Dialog on Brain, Soci-
ety, and Ethics. Themes overlapping with the JNS sympo-
sium were the need for practical ethics tools for neuroscien-
tists, privacy and rapid technology innovation. Unique to
the workshop were themes focused on brain-machine tech-
nology that, for example, enables functional magnetic res-
onance imaging signals to drive movement (literally rock-
paper-scissors) in a robotic hand. Members of the audience
raised questions about whether humanoid robots can have
Kami, a spirit, the capacity to value, and intrinsic motiva-
tion. To my own pointed challenges to proposals in favor of
a robot spirit, Mitsuo Kawato replied that there is little hu-
man behavior that within 10 to 20 years will not be modeled
algorithmically. Could he be right, given what studies by
Antonio Damasio (2003) and others have revealed about hu-
man emotion, creativity, and consciousness? Is our behavior
really so linear? I remained skeptical, albeit intrigued. I cer-
tainly began to wonder where bioethics, as a discipline that
combines biological knowledge with a knowledge of human
value systems (Potter quoted in Jonsen 2003,27), should go
next with respect to neuroethics, given these predictions of
computational neuroscience alone. What then will regener-
ative medicine and nanotechnology bring (Khushf 2004)?
How will forces of biocapitalism factor in?
It is said that the special status of the brain was already
appreciated in 400 BC. Hippocrates believed that, the brain
is the material substrate underlying cognitive and affective
powers. It ought to be generally known that source of our
pleasure ... grief ... is none other than the brain. [It is the
... seat of madness, fear, fright ... eccentricity ... (quoted
in Gross 1998, 13). There was no shortage of 17th- and 18th-
century thought leaders who, two millennia later, provided
the first anatomoclinical correlations of brain and behavior
(Marshall and Fink 2003) or those that support this view
today. As Leshner (2005, 1-2) wrote in the American Journal
of Bioethics, [n]ow that the brain is well accepted as the
seat of the mind, it takes on additional qualities as the seat
of the 'self', the place where our individual personalities
reside.
In this century, behavior is no longer reduced di-
rectly to the function of a single gene; instead, behavior is
increasingly seen to be an emergent property of a distributed
ajob 1
Acknowledgement: Thanks to Frangoise Baylis and Eric Racine. The editor is supported by NIH/NINDS RO1 #NS045831, The Greenwall
Foundation and The Dana Foundation
Address correspondence to Judy Illes, Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University School of Medicine, 701 Welch Road, Suite Al115,
Stanford, CA, 94304-5748. E-mail: illes@stanford.edu](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/ajbio7&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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