Third Installment: First Year Neuroscience Students at Emory Write about the Ethics of Neuroimaging of the Vegetative State

This year, Emory's First Year Neuroscience Graduate Students were asked to write a blog post for the Neuroethics portion of their Neuroscience and Communications Course.



These posts will be delivered in 4 weekly installments, each week
featuring a commentary on a different neuroethics piece. This is the
third of four installments.



This week, we feature blogs covering the following article:



Functional neuroimaging of the vegetative state Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, 235-243 (March 2008).


















Get Adobe Flash player


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why use Brain Cells in Art?

Image
“Bioart” refers to the manipulation of living cells, tissues, or organisms (or their derivatives) for artistic purposes. While artists and biologists have collaborated for centuries to illustrate biological phenomena (you can see some fantastic modern examples of this tradition  here ), “Bioart” refers to the practice started in the early 1990’s of artists training in and performing techniques from the biological sciences, such as cell culture, genetic engineering , and surgery .  Artists have used these technologies to create novel living entities (such as a leather jacket grown in vitro ) or modify existing living entities (such as Stelarc’s third ear ).  These tools provided new options for aesthetic statements (the ability to radically sculpt living tissue to suit particular tastes), ethical statements (if we are growing a small, edible steak in a vat , should we continue to kill cattle for food?) as well as a novel flavor of irony (that “victimless” PETA-endorsed cul...
Read more

Misophonia: Personality Quirk, Symptom, or Neurological Disorder?

Image
When I first learned about misophonia , it was described as a severe annoyance by certain specific sounds, most commonly bodily sounds such as chewing, breathing and slurping, or repetitive sounds such as ceiling fans, beeping, etc.  A quick Wikipedia search described it as, “a form of decreased sound tolerance… believed to be a neurological disorder characterized by negative experiences resulting only from specific sounds, whether loud or soft.” Immediately, I had a number of questions: if misophonia is just a hatred of certain sounds that leads to annoyance or anger, how is this classified as a neurological disorder?  Wouldn’t everyone have this disorder to some degree?  Everyone has their pet peeves as far as sound goes; I cannot stand the sound of people chewing, and while it is sometimes very irritating, I would by no means say that I have a neurological disorder. The Wikipedia entry stated, “Intense anxiety and avoidant behavior may develop, which can lead to decre...
Read more

The Man Who Voled the World

Image
Last Monday, Dr.Hasse Walum gave a talk titled "Genetic and Hormonal Influences on Pair Bonding Related Behavior in Humans" at the Center for Translational Social Neuroscience at Emory . I hadn't heard of Walum's work before I saw the e-mail announcement for his talk, but a little googling got me interested. Here's the most titillating version of his findings: Walum found the gene that makes men cheat. Okay, that is most definitely  not  what he found, and I got the sense from talking with him briefly that he would be the first one to tell you that. So why am I misrepresenting his results? Dr. Hasse Walum: hard-hitting Wired reporter  David Ewing Duncan compares him to Kurt Cobain, but my science and rock star senses detect a David Bowie influence I want to make some points about how science interacts with the media. Like I said, it was reading news reports that made me want to go hear Walum talk. As a graduate student, in his first published study, Walum reported...
Read more