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“They said, ‘You can’t mess with my emotions. It’s like messing with me. It’s mind control.'” That’s what Cornell communication and information science professor Jeffrey T. Hancock reported in a recent New York Times article about the public outcry over the now infamous Facebook emotional manipulation study (read on for details). Hancock was surprised and dismayed over the response. He sees the advent of massive-scale sociology and psychology research on the Internet as a “new era” and he has a point. The days of mostly relying on college students as research subjects may be coming to an end. But how should research be conducted in this new online setting? Is it even appropriate to use data from web sites as it is collected now with little, if any, user knowledge and informed consent existing only in the form of privacy policies that nobody reads? 1 In this post I argue that the Internet is not the Wild West and therefore internet-based research should not be allowed to side st...

By Tamami Fukushi, Ph.D Tamami Fukushi is a Senior Research Scientist at the Platform for the Realization of Regenerative Medicine at the Foundation for Biomedical Research and Innovation in Kobe, Japan and a member of the AJOB Neuroscience editorial board. Her research focuses on areas in neuroethics, neurophysiology, and  the regulation and ethics of stem cell research. At every annual meeting since 2003, the Physiological Society of Japan has scheduled a research ethics symposium, usually dealing with animal experiments and research misconduct. One purpose of the symposia has been to raise audience awareness regarding current ethical issues in neuroscience research. In addition, the symposia have sought to open their audience’s eyes to taking action regarding ethical practices in their daily research activities. This year, the society took up ethical issues in neuroscience. The symposium was organized by Dr. Kiyoshi Kurata, the society’s Chief of Research Ethics Committee, a...

As the population ages, public concern regarding neurodegenerative diseases is rapidly accelerating. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is estimated to effect 5.3 million individuals in the United States alone [1], and treatment options for these patients remain limited. The cause of pathogenesis in AD has remained elusive, severely limiting therapeutic developments.  http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=brainBriefings_10_unravelingalzheimers Alzheimer’s Disease, like many neurodegenerative diseases, is associated with accumulated clumps of protein in the brain, termed “inclusions” or “aggregates”. As a general rule, healthy individuals do not exhibit these inclusions. The protein inclusions associated with Alzheimer brains include amyloid β (Aβ) plaques and tau neurofibrillary tangles; however the extent to which these aggregated proteins contribute to disease, if any, is unknown. Due to the dearth of evidence linking aggregation to disease progression, it has been suggested that a...