What If? The Farther Shores of Neuroethics

Neuroscience is clearly making enormous progress toward understanding how human brains work. The implications of this progress for ethics, law, society, and culture are much less clear. Some have argued that neuroscience will lead to vast changes, superseding much of law and ethics. The likely limits to the explanatory power of neuroscience argue against that position, as do the limits to the social relevance of what neuroscience will be able to explain. At the same time neuroscience is likely to change societies through increasing their abilities to predict future behavior, to infer subjective mental states by observing physical brain states (??read minds??), to provide evidence in some cases relevant to criminal responsibility, to provide new ways to intervene to ??treat antisocial brains,?? and to enhance healthy brains. Neuroscience should make important cultural changes in our special, and specially negative, views of ??mental?? versus ??physical?? illness by showing that mental illness is a dysfunction of a physical organ. It will not likely change our beliefs, implicit or explicit, in free will, or spark a new conflict between science and religion akin to the creationism controversy.     

CRISPR Critters and CRISPR Cracks

This essay focuses on possible nonhuman applications of CRISPR/Cas9 that are likely to be widely overlooked because they are unexpected and, in some cases, perhaps even “frivolous.” We look at five uses for “CRISPR Critters”: wild de-extinction, domestic de-extinction, personal whim, art, and novel forms of disease prevention. We then discuss the current regulatory framework and its possible limitations in those contexts. We end with questions about some deeper issues raised by the increased human control over life on earth offered by genome editing.     

Strangers at the benchside: research ethics consultation

Institutional ethics consultation services for biomedical scientists have begun to proliferate, especially for clinical researchers. We discuss several models of ethics consultation and describe a team-based approach used at Stanford University in the context of these models. As research ethics consultation services expand, there are many unresolved questions that need to be addressed, including what the scope, composition, and purpose of such services should be, whether core competencies for consultants can and should be defined, and how conflicts of interest should be mitigated. We make preliminary recommendations for the structure and process of research ethics consultation, based on our initial experiences in a pilot program.