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Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons . By Nathan Ahlgrim If we want to – to paraphrase the classic Six Million Dollar Man – rebuild people, rebuild them to be better, stronger, faster, we need more than fancy motors and titanium bones. Robot muscles cannot help a paralyzed person stand, and robot voices cannot restore communication to the voiceless, without some way for the person to control them. Methods of control need not be cutting-edge. The late Dr. Stephen Hawking’s instantly recognizable voice synthesizer was controlled by a single cheek movement , which seems shockingly analog in today’s world. Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) are the emerging technology that promise to bypass all external input and allow robotic devices to communicate directly with the brain. Dr. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, discussed the good and bad of this technology in March’s The Future Now NEEDs seminar:  " To Be Implanted a...

By Henry T. Greely Henry T. (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 on Neuroscience in Society; chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research; is the President Elect of the International Neuroethics Society; and serves on the Neuroscience Forum of the National Academy of Medicine; 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.  Professor G...

It is my pleasure to present you with our first edition of The Neuroethics Blog reader. This reader includes some of the most popular posts on the site and highlights our junior talent. While the blog showcases cutting-edge debates in neuroethics, it also serves as a mechanism for mentoring junior scholars and students and providing them with exciting opportunities to have their pieces featured alongside established scholars in the field. In addition, the blog allows for community building, inviting scholars from multiple disciplines to participate. Our contributors have included individuals at various levels of education from fields such as law, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, English, medicine, philosophy, women’s studies, and religion, to name a few. Each blog post is a collaborative process, read and edited numerous times by the editorial leadership in partnership with the author. We aim to continue to mentor and deliver quality posts that serve to cultivate not only our ne...

The Montreal Neuroethics Conference for Young Researchers 2015 will be held in Montréal, Québec, on April 17th, 2015 at the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM), Montréal, Quebec. This one-day international conference is aimed at young researchers, trainees, and students from all fields interested in neuroethics. In addition to the program on the day of the event, we are hosting an essay competition where 5 winning papers in English will be candidates for fast-tracked publication in a special issue of the journal Neuroethics and 5 winning papers in French will be candidates for fast-tracked publication in a special issue of the journal Bioéthique Online.  Special Note from the Organizers: "Our immediate goals in organizing this conference are to increase the visibility of neuroethics among different international student populations and to bring young researchers in neuroethics together to facilitate future collaborations. Young researchers are the future ...

By Nicholas Fitz and Roland Nadler** Nicholas Fitz Nick is a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia.  Roland is a third-year J.D. student at Stanford Law School and previously worked as a Graduate Research Assistant at the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia. **equal contribution Roland Nadler The second decade of neuroethics is now well underway. Much like the human brain itself, some of its developmental “critical periods” have run out, but many others remain open. How will we use these remaining opportunities to shape the field? Junior participants in these spaces should take the initiative to engage with unresolved questions about the nature and structure of neuroethics as a discipline. After all, those of us at the beginning of our careers have a particularly significant stake in the answers to those questions, with most of our academic and professional lives still ahead of us...

I made and abandoned several attempts at an opening sentence for this post and all of them included a deft way to bury the lead. The lead is this: I’m thrilled for two of my students whose video, Empathy and your Brain , was selected as one of the top submissions to the 2014 Brain Awareness Video Contest . Their video now has the chance to be selected as the fan favorite in the People’s Choice contest. But why was I burying it? I suppose I’ve become accustomed to integrating Neuroethics content and dialogue in courses that I teach, sometimes as part of the formal curriculum, but more often as implicit or hidden curriculum . Since Neuroethics courses are still not yet standard fare in most academic institutions, I generally don’t have an opportunity to explicitly test out some of the currently evolving creative techniques in Neuroethics education like those featured on NeuroethicsWomen Leaders teaching resources page . Instead, I often work the ideas and concepts into other mor...

*Editor's note: Jason Shepard was one of Emory Neuroethics Program's inaugural graduate Neuroethics Scholars. His co-authored manuscript mentioned below is related to his Scholar's project. Recently, the question of whether our notions of free will, along with whether our responsibility-holding practices that appear to be based on free will, can survive in light of discoveries from the behavioral and brain sciences was named as one of the Top Ten Philosophical Issues of the 21st Century . The interest in free will and how discoveries in neuroscience and psychology affect our beliefs and attitudes about free will extends well beyond the halls of philosophy departments. The topic has also attracted a lot of interest from neuroscientists, biologists, and psychologists [1]. And, of course, these very debates are of central interest to neuroethicists. The wide range of interests in these debates is a symptom of the fact that these debates matter: The debate over what people bel...

Neurodiversity is a term that was coined by Australian social scientist and autism advocate Judy Singer. In her 1998 thesis, she wrote: “For me, the key significance of the ‘Autistic Spectrum’ lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or what I want to call ‘Neurodiversity.’ The ‘Neurologically Different’ represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class/gender/race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability.”[1] Similar to the way biodiversity is discussed as critical to the stability of the ecosystem, neurodiversity is considered to be critical for human and cultural stability. In other words, Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and other neurological differences should be a part of our community and, thus, neither cured nor subject to intense rehabilitative or normalizing efforts. Before I discuss how neurodiversity is useful to my work and to ASD-related professions, I want to quickly review ASD and my curre...

Neil Levy By Neil Levy, PhD Neil Levy is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics , Head of Neuroethics at Florey Neuroscience Institutes , University of Melbourne, and  a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board.  His research examines moral responsibility and free will. Might doing ethics be harmful to your moral health? One would expect just the opposite: the deeper you think about ethics, the more you read and the larger the number of cases you consider, the more expertise you acquire. Bioethicists and neuroethicists are moral experts, one might think. That’s why it is appropriate for media organizations to ask us for our opinion, or for hospitals and research institutions to ask us to serve on institutional review boards . In this post, I leave aside the question whether ethicists like me deserve to have their opinions about controversial issues given special weight when we offer them. It is really hard to know what could serve as evidence fo...