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By Ann E. Fink Ann Fink is currently the Wittig Fellow in Feminist Biology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with an appointment in Gender and Women’s Studies and concurrent affiliations with Psychology and the Center for Healthy Minds. Her research in cellular and behavioral neuroscience has appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurophysiology, PNAS and other journals. Ann’s interdisciplinary work addresses the ethics of neuroscience in relation to gender, mental health and social justice.  Emotionality and gender are tied together in the popular imagination in ways that permeate mental health research. At first glance, gender, emotion, and mental health seem like a simple equation: when populations are divided in two, women show roughly double the incidence of depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders 1-3 . Innate biological explanations are easy to produce in the form of genes or hormones. It could be tempting to conclude that being born with XX chr...

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...

"A queer symbol of new gender image" by Finnish artist Susi Waegelein At the beginning of August, Ruth Padawer published a piece in the New York Times magazine about gender non-conforming children and parents. Last week, Dr. Larry Young of Emory University and science writer Brian Alexander (who are publishing a book together, The Chemistry Between Us ) published a response to the article , in which they argue, essentially, that gender is biologically hardwired into the brains of fetuses by the organizational effects of hormones. They go on to implicitly endorse what has been called the “brain sex theory” of transgender identity/behavior. According to this theory, hormones organize the sex/gender of the brain much later than they organize the sex/gender of the genitals, allowing for a discordance to develop between the two ( Bao 2011 ). Admirably, Young and Alexander use the brain sex theory to argue for an acceptance of gender non-conforming children. They write, “so rath...

As the semester drew to an end, and Kristina Gupta and I closed out our course on Feminism, Sexuality, and Neuroethics , I have been thinking a lot about the science of sexual identity. Participants in our class set out to consider the ethics of separating human beings into distinct kinds and conducting neuroscientific research into those separations. Along the way, we all thought about what the boundaries of sexuality and gender were, how they are culturally bound, how desire is measured (and mismeasured), both in the contemporary era and throughout history. We considered the use of these differences to create legislation and the effects of both medicalization and pathologization for members of sexual minorities. I'm sure this is exactly what happens. (Original image from hyperboleandahalf.com) On the last day of class, we asked our students to take into consideration all the discussions we had had over the course of the semester and reflect on their own opinions about the scienti...

Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About The Male And Female Brain (2003), is almost a decade old now, but his thesis keeps popping up in various places. For example, in a recent (and truly delightful) book on neuroscience and religion, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (2011), Robert McCauley uses Baron-Cohen’s work to suggest that researchers looking for “hyper-empathetic” subjects might want to check out the local convent. Baron-Cohen’s main argument is that, on average, men and women have different cognitive strengths and weaknesses: men are more adept at “systematizing” and less adept at “empathizing,” while women are more adept at “empathizing” and less adept at “systematizing.”  He goes on to argue that people with autism have “hyper-male” brains (in other words, they are especially good at systemizing and particularly poor at empathizing). According to Baron-Cohen, these differences in cognitive abilities are likely to be the result of...

Who’d believe there’s a liberal professor (he freely acknowledges he belongs to this group) that’s willing to admit that conservatives might be right about something? Don't get too excited; he also thinks the reasoning that many conservatives use to decide what’s right is all wrong. What’s more, he thinks that neuroscience proves the way that many conservatives reason is wrong. The professor, Dr. John Banja , led a discussion of one of his articles last Wednesday at the second meeting of the Neuroethics Journal Club hosted by the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics. I had this great idea to summarize Dr. Banja's message with music videos. It turned out to be harder than I thought (but I'm still peppering this post with pop)--there is not one song that has the words "virtue essentialism" in the title, although those words are in the title of Dr. Banja’s article: “ Virtue Essentialism, Prototypes, and the Moral Conservative Opposition to Enhancement T...