Manipulating your mind

The Decade of the Brain, proclaimed by US President George Bush in 1990, passed without making much of an obvious impact. But it did in fact produce considerable scientific advances in neuro‐biology, giving scientists an exponentially increasing knowledge of how the brain works and the means to manipulate biochemical processes within and between nerve cells. This knowledge is slowly trickling down to society as well, be it in the pharmaceutical industry, to parents concerned about their child's performance in school, to students looking for chemical helpers to pass their exams, or to military researchers who have an obvious interest in keeping soldiers awake and alert.> Unlike the many claimed applications of genetics… diagnostic and therapeutic products from neurobiological research are already availableThe ability to fiddle with the brain with ever‐increasing effectiveness has also created critical questions about how to use this knowledge. Francis Fukuyama, in Our Posthuman Future , Leon Kass, Chairman of the US President's Council on Bioethics, and Steven Rose, a neurobiologist at the Open University, UK, are the most prominent and outspoken critics of the use of psychopharmaceuticals and other neurological techniques to analyse and interfere with human mental capabilities. Their concerns have also grasped the attention of neurobiologists, ethicists, philosophers and the lay public, who are all slowly realising the enormous potential of modern neuroscience. “People closely identify themselves with their brains, they don't with their genes,” said Arthur L. Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.![][1] Although these debates started in the late 1990s, it took the general public a bit longer to take notice— The New York Times and The Economist did not pick up on the issue until 2002. “There is a great amount of information about the brain but no one's paying attention to the ethics,” … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif