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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...

In May of 2013, The New York Times Magazine published an article discussing the ongoing clinical trials of a unique new drug that caught the interest of Emory University neuroscience graduate student Mallory Bowers. The drug, dubbed “Lybrido”, was being tested for its ability to improve sexual desire in women.  However, Lybrido is not just a female Viagra-like formulation.  That is apparently one part of it but the other, perhaps more surprising part, is the pill’s testosterone coating that is designed to melt away immediately in the mouth. To better understand how testosterone (T) could modulate female desire, and to discuss the neuroethical implications of pharmaceutically targeting it, Ms. Bowers chose a recent paper in the Journal of Sex Research by Goldey et al. entitled “Sexual Fantasies and Gender/Sex: A Multimethod Approach with Quantitative Content Analysis and Hormonal Responses” for the second Neuroethics Journal Club of the year.  In the present study, Sari ...

Dr. Sari van Anders After attending the Neurogenderings Conference in Vienna, where participants debated whether it would be possible to conduct feminist neuroscience research, I decided it would be useful to interview an actual practicing feminist neuroscientist – and I knew just who to talk to. Dr. Sari van Anders is an Assistant Professor in Psychology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her Ph.D. in Biological & Cognitive Psychology from Simon Fraser University. In her social neuroendocrinology lab at the University of Michigan, she conducts feminist neuroscience research on a variety of topics, with a principle focus on the social modulation of testosterone via sexuality, partnering/pair bonding, and nurturance. She has received grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Institute of Bisexuality and has published articles in Hormones and Behavior , Archives of Sexual Behavior , and Psychoneuroendocrinology , among others. ...