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By Jonathan D. Moreno, PhD Dr.  Jonathan D. Moreno is one of 14 Penn Integrates Knowledge university professors at the University of Pennsylvania , holding the David and Lyn Silfen chair. He is also Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, of History and Sociology of Science, and of Philosophy. Moreno is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC. In 2008-09 he served as a member of President Barack Obama’s transition team. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board. In September I arrived in Geneva to keynote a conference at the Brocher Foundation on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the ghost of John Calvin still casts a long shadow over the stern ethos of the Swiss. It was a glorious day in that oasis of calm and cleanliness, where the sheer power of holding much of the world’s money in its vaults justifies a muffled smugness. Compulsively, I checked my email as my taxi glided past the Hotel President Wilson, the monument o...

Last December 2013, the neuroscience graduate students at Emory University spearheaded an effort alongside many other sponsors to organize and implement a symposium to explore the neuroscientific basis of race and gender bias. The program, entitled “Bias in the Academy: From Neural Networks to Social Networks,”  awarded the Laney Graduate School New Thinkers/New Leaders fund and support from CMBC and the Center for Ethics, aimed to provide students and faculty alike an overview of the psychological and neuroscientific research on race and gender bias and how this might be used to mitigate harmful effects of stereotype and bias in the academy. After listening to and participating in the symposium, I realized that the symposium speakers and student planners all hoped to answer a similar question regarding the nature of the brain: Is the brain “hard-wired” to categorize people into groups in a way that makes negative stereotyping inevitable or is the brain exquisitely plastic insof...

On December 13, 2013 the Marcus Autism Center and the Atlanta Autism Consortium co-hosted a mini-symposium looking at the role of faith and religion in the lives and well-being of individuals living and working with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Organized by Marcus psychologist Dr. Samuel Fernandez-Carriba and Georgia State professor Dr.  Anne-Pierre Goursaud the event, titled “Faith, Values and Autism,” included a panel of six individuals from a variety of faith perspectives and featured a presentation by Dr. Alfiee M. Breland-Noble on the development and implementation of faith based mental health promotion. This topic has important implications for neuroethics and neurodiversity , the perspective that autism and other neurological disorders are part of natural human neurological diversity that should be neither cured nor normalized. The religious or faith-based perspective of a family impacts how the presence of autistic traits in a child is framed. Some religions, for ...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a complex disorder typically characterized by social impairment and communication deficits, and most recently the CDC has estimated that 1 in 88 American children are affected by a form of ASD. 1 A reliable diagnosis for autism can be offered at 24 months, but most children are diagnosed later after attending school. For the first Neuroethics journal club of the spring semester, ILA graduate student and Neuroethics Scholar Jennifer Sarrett led a discussion on a new technology that could offer preclinical risk assessment in children as young as 2 months. Even though children and adults with autism exhibit a wide variety of individual and unique symptoms, a common attribute of those diagnosed with autism is a deficit in the ability to make eye contact. In a paper published in Nature late last year, researchers from the Marcus Autism Center and Emory University School of Medicine used special eye-tracking equipment to measure eye fixation in children on...