Neuroethics: a modern context for ethics in neuroscience

Abstract

Neuroethics, a recently modernized field at the intersection of bioethics and neuroscience, is founded on centuries of discussion of the ethical issues associated with mind and behavior. Broadly defined, neuroethics is concerned with ethical, legal and social policy implications of neuroscience, and with aspects of neuroscience research itself. Advances in neuroscience increasingly challenge long-held views of the self and the individual's relationship to society. Neuroscience also has led to innovations in clinical medicine that have not only therapeutic but also non-therapeutic dimensions that extend well beyond previously charted boundaries. The exponential increase in cross-disciplinary research, the commercialization of cognitive neuroscience, the impetus for training in ethics, and the increased attention being paid to public understanding of science all illuminate the important role of neuroethics in neuroscience.

Figure 1

Milestones in the history of ethics in neuroscience. From left to right: prefrontal lobotomies were introduced for treatment of mentally ill patients in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; human experimentation during the 1930s and 1940s led to the Nuremberg trials; two major professional neuroscience organizations were established in the 1960s, and committees and roundtables devoted to social issues were created within these organizations in the 1970s and 1980s; revelations of the Tuskegee studies and other human subject violations in research led to the publication of the Belmont Report, also in the 1970s; the Office of Technology Assessment surveyed the potential impact of neuroscience in 1984; UNESCO founded the International Bioethics Committee (IBC) in 1993, and the IBC developed an independent report on the ethical implications of developments in neuroscience in 1996; the Dana Foundation hosted a meeting called ‘Neuroethics: Mapping the Field’ in San Francisco (CA, USA) in 2002; and the Society for Neuroscience extended its commitment to discussions about social issues in neuroscience, formally begun in 1983, to an annual lecture on Neuroethics in 2003 and a ‘Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society’ series in 2005.