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By John Banja  John Banja , PhD is a medical ethicist at Emory University’s Center for Ethics, a professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine , and the editor of AJOB Neuroscience . In next month’s (December, 2014) issue of the American Journal of Bioethics , I’ll have an article appear on drug and alcohol use among health professionals. My paper is a counter-argument to one that appeared in JAMA in 2013, 1 which recommended that physicians who are involved in serious, harm-causing medical errors should be drug and alcohol tested on the spot. Now, I’ve studied the occurrence of medical errors for over a decade, and the more I thought about that proposal, the more I thought it was a bad idea. So I wrote the article, sent it to AJOB , and eventually it was accepted. 2 The point of this blog post is to discuss something that stems from what I learned from the literature on drug and alcohol abusing physicians: most of them can go years, even decades, without the drug or...

Men and women experience fluctuations in sexual motivation over a lifetime. Whether sexual desire is enhanced or diminished at any particular time can depend on a number of factors and circumstances, but researchers from McGill University recently set out to determine specifically how pain impacts sexual behavior. 1 Results from this study , published in The Journal of Neuroscience earlier this year, were the topic of the most recent “Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News” discussion facilitated by Emory Women’s Gender and Sexuality graduate student Natalie Turrin and Neuroscience graduate student Mallory Bowers. To study how pain impacts sexual motivation, researchers used a partitioned Plexiglas chamber where the partition contained small, semi-circular openings only large enough for the female mice to pass through (this study required that male mice be greater than 45 g and female mice smaller than 25 g). In this set-up, the females were free to either cross the partit...

By Walter Glannon, PhD Walter Glannon is a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Biomedical Ethics and Ethical Theory. He is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board. Philosophers have argued that moral and criminal responsibility presuppose that actions cannot result from sequences that bypass agents’ control of their mental states as the causes of their actions (A. Mele, Autonomous Agents , 1995). Agents must act from their own mechanisms, which cannot be influenced by drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, brainwashing or other interventions (J. M. Fischer and M. Ravizza, Responsibility and Control , 1998). Moral and criminal responsibility excludes all forms of brain manipulation. Via thejuryexpert.com With deep-brain stimulation (DBS) and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), neuroscientists can alter the brain and the mental capacities it mediates. The first device modulates dysfunctional neural cir...

2014 INS Annual Meeting November 13 & 14 in Washington, D.C. There is still time to register for the annual International Neuroethics Society Conference. The schedule can be found  here . Learn the latest on the United States  National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative  and the European Commission  Human Brain Project . Hear about international case studies of neuroscience in the courtroom, discuss human rights in the neuroethics dialogue AND engage in networking opportunities during breakfast, lunch and two receptions. Speakers include NIH Directors, representatives from Congress, co-director of the Human Brain Project and a representative from the  US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues . Public Event on November 13:  "Neuroscience Knowledge & the Robotic Mind." We kick off our meeting with a thought-provoking public event on November 13 from 5 - 7 p.m. All-day Annual Meeting on November 14:  Speakers include Paul ...