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By Kaitlyn B. Lee Kaitlyn “Kai” Lee is a Project Coordinator in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine. She helps to investigate the ethical, legal, and social issues of integrating whole genome sequencing into clinical care as part of MedSeq , a project funded by the NIH’s Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research ( CSER ) program. Kai earned her BA in Neuroscience from Middlebury College and hopes to continue her education through a joint JD/MPH program . In her op-ed published in the Houston Chronicle, “ Presidential candidates should be tested for Alzheimer’s ,” radio and television personality turned author and keynote speaker Dayna Steele advocates testing presidential candidates for Alzheimer’s disease and releasing their results to the voting public. Steele believes voters have a right to know their future president’s Alzheimer’s test results, as she maintains, “I want to know that the candidate I choose not only supports my priorities bu...

By Katie Givens Kime Katie Givens Kime is a doctoral student at Emory University in the Graduate Division of Religion , as well as the Center for Mind, Brain and Culture , and the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. Her dissertation investigates the role of religious conceptions in addiction recovery methods. As neuroscience has expanded in capacity, resources, and public attention, many in the social sciences and humanities have been loudly critical: “Reductionism! Neurobiological chauvinism!” The essence of such critique is that the objectivity championed by the sciences masks all sorts of hidden biases, unconscious agendas, political motivations and economic purposes. Many historians and philosophers of science have argued that even choosing the object of scientific study and communicating observations inevitably involves language, point-of-view, and value prioritization. This means the nature of scientific knowledge, to an important degree, is unavoidably sociocultural [1]. Femini...

By Henry T. Greely Hank Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics at Stanford University. He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from advances in the biosciences, particularly from genetics, neuroscience, and human stem cell research. He directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program in Neuroscience in Society ; chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research ; and serves on the Neuroscience Forum of the Institute of Medicine, the Advisory Council for the National Institute for General Medical Sciences of NIH, the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law of the National Academy of Sciences, and the NIH Multi-Council Working Group on the BRAIN Initiative . He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007. His book, THE END OF SEX AND THE FUTURE OF HUMAN REPRODUCTION , was published in May 2016 . Profes...

By Walter Glannon, PhD Walter Glannon, PhD , is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Bioethics and the Brain (Oxford, 2007) and Brain, Body and Mind: Neuroethics with a Human Face (Oxford, 2011) and editor of Free Will and the Brain: Neuroscientific, Philosophical and Legal Perspectives (Cambridge, 2015). Neuroscientists can measure changes in the brain associated with different types of memory. Recent experiments on rodents have shown that memories can be manipulated. In one experiment, researchers implanted a false fear memory in a mouse brain, causing it to elicit a fear response to a stimulus to which it was not actually exposed [1]. In a different experiment, researchers electrically stimulated place cells in a mouse hippocampus as well as cells in the reward system during sleep. This induced learned behavior where mice linked a specific location to a reward [2].  This type of manipulation may eventually serve a therapeutic purpos...