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We’ve all been there. It’s exam week of your junior year of college with two papers due the day after a final. You’re a new faculty member with a semester of lectures to prepare and a lab to get started. You’re a tax accountant and it’s early April. There is simply too much to do and not enough hours in the day to get it all done while sleeping enough to keep your brain working like you need it to. In that situation, where do you stand on cognitive enhancement drugs? Most of us wouldn’t hesitate to grab a cup of coffee but what about a caffeine pill, or a friend’s Adderall? Many discussions about cognitive enhancement eventually come down to this question: where do we draw the line? Currently most of the cognitive enhancers that create unease for ethicists and the general public alike are prescription drugs that were originally meant to treat conditions recognized as out of the realm of “normal” such as diseases or deficits. Therefore, a key step in deciding where we should stand on th...

That title sounds like the prequel to a William Burroughs novel. I wish I'd come up with it myself, but I'm actually plagiarizing almost word for word from Dr. Steven Hyman, Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Last week, Emory awarded Dr. Hyman this year's Neuroscience and Ethics Award. Dr. Hyman spoke on "Addiction as a Window on Volitional Control", which shouldn't be surprising, given his molecular and genetic studies of the dopaminergic system. Earlier in the day, Dr. Hyman stopped by the Emory Center for Ethics to have lunch with faculty and students from several schools and programs. He held forth on the state of translational neuropsychiatric research for an hour and a half, while the rest of us prevented him from eating by constantly barraging him with questions. I have a feeling I'm not the only one who found what he had to say both thought-provoking and provocative. He liberally spice...