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8 Am. J. Bioethics 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/ajbio8 and id is 1 raw text is: The American Journal of Bioethics, 8(1): 1-2, 2008 Copyright (c Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1526-5161 print / 1536-0075 online DOI: 10.1080/15265160701829038 Women's Neuroethics? Why Sex Matters for Neuroethics Molly C. Chalfin, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University Emily R. Murphy, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford Law School Katrina A. Karkazis, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University The Neuroethics Affinity Group of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) met for the third time in October 2007 to review progress in the field of neuroethics and consider high-impact priorities for the future. Closely aligned with ASBH's own goals of recruiting junior scholars to bioethics and mentoring them to successful careers, the Neuroethics Affinity Group placed a call for new ideas to be presented at the Group meeting, specifically by junior attendees. One group responded with the idea to probe a new direction for neuroethics focused on the neuroscience of gender differences. In the spirit of full disclosure, two of the authors are a student (Chalfin) and fellow (Murphy) of the program I formerly directed at Stanford University. The third (Karkazis) is junior faculty there. The intellectual ownership of the ideas in the report below, however, are entirely theirs. Like lit torches in a juggling act, there are many directions this project can go. The report is a snapshot of these authors' first iteration of the concept of women's neuroethics. Many thanks are extended to participants of the ASBH Neuroethics Affinity Group meeting whose enthusiasm and feedback was immensely helpful in shaping the concept and moving it ahead. Judy Illes, Editor AJOB-Neuroscience How and why women and men are different is a topic of en- during scientific and public interest. Over the past decade, the number of neuroscience studies documenting sex dif- ferences in brain anatomy, chemistry, and function, and in- volving cognitive domains such as emotion, memory, and learning, has exploded (Cahill 2006). Although scholars in the field of neuroethics have explored advances in neuro- science from many angles, few, if any, have paid attention to neuroscientific work on sex differences or to gender as a primary category of analysis. Why should we pay special attention to the neuroscience of sex differences? Perhaps the most important reason is that this work will prove important for contested ideas about the so-called nature of human nature. One only need look to the Larry Summers debacle in 2005 to see how con- tentious the topic is and how far-reaching its effects may be. Although the question of how and why women and men are different is an old one, neuroscience's use of cutting-edge technology - coupled with a growing reliance on science to shed light on complex human behavior - increases the likelihood that this work will leap to the forefront of public discussion and debate about social equality. While neuroscience is concerned with elucidating the origin and extent of behavioral and cognitive differences between women and men, the questions that predominate for us are of a different nature: How ought we disseminate this information into a sensitive social environment that has a history of bias and discrimination against women? What are the implications of this work for our understandings of what makes us women and men? How should this research be applied in educational, medical, and legal contexts, if at all? The sensitive, careful interpretation and communica- tion of research findings on sex differences in the brain will be critical. This is especially true for findings with the potential to promote discrimination. Researchers, for ex- ample, have repeatedly confirmed that men's brains are bigger, on average, than women's. Although today we know that this finding bears no relationship to intelligence, that was not the case 100 years ago when astute scien- tists such as Francis Galton and Paul Broca championed brain size as a measure of human intelligence, and such knowledge was used to justify social inequities of the day (Gould 1981). ajob 1 Received 6 November 2007; accepted 21 December 2007. Address correspondence to Katrina A. Karkazis, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, 701 Welch Road, Suite Al105, Palo Alto, CA 94304-5748. E-mail: karkazis@stanford.edu

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