posted 05-25-2002 02:17 AM
The future of mind control
May 23rd 2002
From The Economist print editionPeople already worry about genetics. They should worry about brain science too
IN AN attempt to treat depression, neuroscientists once carried out a simple experiment. Using electrodes, they stimulated the brains of women in ways that caused pleasurable feelings. The subjects came to no harm—indeed their symptoms appeared to evaporate, at least temporarily—but they quickly fell in love with their experimenters.
Such a procedure (and there have been worse in the history of neuroscience) poses far more of a threat to human dignity and autonomy than does cloning. Cloning is the subject of fierce debate, with proposals for wholesale bans. Yet when it comes to neuroscience, no government or treaty stops anything. For decades, admittedly, no neuroscientist has been known to repeat the love experiment. A scientist who used a similar technique to create remote-controlled rats seemed not even to have entertained the possibility. “Humans? Who said anything about humans?” he said, in genuine shock, when questioned. “We work on rats.”
Ignoring a possibility does not, however, make it go away. If asked to guess which group of scientists is most likely to be responsible, one day, for overturning the essential nature of humanity, most people might suggest geneticists. In fact neurotechnology poses a greater threat—and also a more immediate one. Moreover, it is a challenge that is largely ignored by regulators and the public, who seem unduly obsessed by gruesome fantasies of genetic dystopias.
A person's genetic make-up certainly has something important to do with his subsequent behaviour. But genes exert their effects through the brain. If you want to predict and control a person's behaviour, the brain is the place to start. Over the course of the next decade, scientists may be able to predict, by examining a scan of a person's brain, not only whether he will tend to mental sickness or health, but also whether he will tend to depression or violence. Neural implants may within a few years be able to increase intelligence or to speed up reflexes. Drug companies are hunting for molecules to assuage brain-related ills, from paralysis to shyness .
A public debate over the ethical limits to such neuroscience is long overdue. It may be hard to shift public attention away from genetics, which has so clearly shown its sinister side in the past. The spectre of eugenics, which reached its culmination in Nazi Germany, haunts both politicians and public. The fear that the ability to monitor and select for desirable characteristics will lead to the subjugation of the undesirable—or the merely unfashionable—is well-founded.
Not so long ago neuroscientists, too, were guilty of victimising the mentally ill and the imprisoned in the name of science. Their sins are now largely forgotten, thanks in part to the intractable controversy over the moral status of embryos. Anti-abortion lobbyists, who find stem-cell research and cloning repugnant, keep the ethics of genetic technology high on the political agenda. But for all its importance, the quarrel over abortion and embryos distorts public discussion of bioethics; it is a wonder that people in the field can discuss anything else.
In fact, they hardly do. America's National Institutes of Health has a hefty budget for studying the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics, but it earmarks nothing for the specific study of the ethics of neuroscience. The National Institute of Mental Health, one of its component bodies, has seen fit to finance a workshop on the ethical implications of “cyber-medicine”, yet it has not done the same to examine the social impact of drugs for “hyperactivity”, which 7% of American six- to eleven-year-olds now take. The Wellcome Trust, Britain's main source of finance for the study of biomedical ethics, has a programme devoted to the ethics of brain research, but the number of projects is dwarfed by its parallel programme devoted to genetics.
Uncontrollable fears
The worriers have not spent these resources idly. Rather, they have produced the first widespread legislative and diplomatic efforts directed at containing scientific advance. The Council of Europe and the United Nations have declared human reproductive cloning a violation of human rights. The Senate is soon to vote on a bill that would send American scientists to prison for making cloned embryonic stem cells.
Yet neuroscientists have been left largely to their own devices, restrained only by standard codes of medical ethics and experimentation. This relative lack of regulation and oversight has produced a curious result. When it comes to the brain, society now regards the distinction between treatment and enhancement as essentially meaningless. Taking a drug such as Prozac when you are not clinically depressed used to be called cosmetic, or non-essential, and was therefore considered an improper use of medical technology. Now it is regarded as just about as cosmetic, and as non-essential, as birth control or orthodontics. American legislators are weighing the so-called parity issue—the argument that mental treatments deserve the same coverage in health-insurance plans as any other sort of drug. Where drugs to change personality traits were once seen as medicinal fripperies, or enhancements, they are now seen as entitlements.
This flexible attitude towards neurotechnology—use it if it might work, demand it if it does—is likely to extend to all sorts of other technologies that affect health and behaviour, both genetic and otherwise. Rather than resisting their advent, people are likely to begin clamouring for those that make themselves and their children healthier and happier.
This might be bad or it might be good. It is a question that public discussion ought to try to settle, perhaps with the help of a regulatory body such as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, which oversees embryo research in Britain. History teaches that worrying overmuch about technological change rarely stops it. Those who seek to halt genetics in its tracks may soon learn that lesson anew, as rogue scientists perform experiments in defiance of well-intended bans. But, if society is concerned about the pace and ethics of scientific advance, it should at least form a clearer picture of what is worth worrying about, and why.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1143583
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The ethics of brain science
Open your mind
May 23rd 2002
From The Economist print edition
Genetics may yet threaten privacy, kill autonomy, make society homogeneous and gut the concept of human nature. But neuroscience could do all of these things first
IN THE genetically engineered world portrayed in “Gattaca”, a movie made in 1997, the hero and heroine attend a concert in which a pianist performs a concerto that can be played only by a person with six fingers on each hand. This is a society in which genetic perfectionists have had their way. The concert-goers have been altered before birth to be free of such ailments as baldness, obesity and diabetes, and to be tall, good-looking and intelligent. In that room, improbable as it may seem, only Ethan Hawke has lived a life free of genetic enhancement; he alone has had to take his chances with the genetic lottery of natural conception.
Compare this scene to one in which the effects of neurotechnology (technology that makes it possible to manipulate the brain) are pervasive. The old man on the left of the aisle is being saved from Alzheimer's disease by an implant that bathes his brain cells in a healthy broth of chemicals. The little girl in the circle, vows her doctor, has a cortex that will one day win her a Nobel prize in physics—if she keeps up the correct regime of “cogniceuticals”, of course.
As a condition of their employment, the security guards posted at the entrance had to undergo brain scans to demonstrate that they were free of propensities to uncontrollable rage. The musicians on stage are on drugs that speed their reflexes, heighten their hearing and assuage their performance anxiety. Not that different from “Gattaca”, is it?
The mind's eye
Although often overlooked, advances in neurotechnology raise ethical and legal questions of the same nature and gravity as advances in genetics. Concerns about genetic technology fall into three main categories: first, how much screening should be allowed for certain genetic traits; second, who should have access to such information; and third, what will happen when those traits can be modified at will, possibly in ways that challenge the very idea of what it is to be human.
Neuroscientists may soon be able to screen people's brains to assess their mental health
Concerns about neurotechnology fall into the same three groups. Neuroscientists may soon be able to screen people's brains to assess their mental health; to distribute that information, possibly accidentally, to employers or insurers; and to “fix” faulty personality traits with drugs or implants on demand. They may also, according to some philosophers, expose fallacies in philosophical thinking that go to the heart of human nature by showing how the brain actually makes decisions.
Until recently, neurobiologists have been constrained in their research by the consideration that most kinds of experiment with the human brain are seen as unethical. Tradition has it that they must sit around with their fingers crossed, hoping that a patient will walk through the door sporting a tumour or other injury in a part of the brain whose function is not yet understood. Ideally, this patient will show some odd behaviour—say, being able to multiply but not add, or mistreating cats but not dogs—that can be tied to the injured area. Thus, painstakingly, a map of which parts of the brain do what can be built up.
Over the past decade, however, machines for measuring brain activity have proliferated. There are now half a dozen such technologies, ranging from old favourites, such as electro-encephalography, to new-fangled methods including magneto-encephalography, which measures the brain's magnetic fields, and single-photon-emission computerised tomography, which tracks radioactively tagged chemicals around the organ.
One of the most important new techniques is functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI), which employs powerful magnetic fields to monitor the rate of blood flow in the brain, and thus to determine which parts are particularly active.
With the help of fMRI, researchers can observe which brain areas are involved when somebody performs a particular task or thinks along particular lines. That could be a boon. It could, for example, identify children whose brains are not maturing normally—making possible early intervention with, say, special lessons.
Researchers can observe which brain areas are involved when somebody performs a particular task or thinks along particular lines
A study to be published shortly in Neuroimage shows how this might work. Vinod Menon and his colleagues at Stanford University have been using fMRI to investigate how people's brains behave when they are subjected to the Stroop colour-word interference task. The Stroop task is a well-established psychological test that presents subjects with the names of colours printed in ink that does not match the colour named. The subjects have to name the colour of the ink, not the word that has been printed.
As people mature, their brains get better at coping with the challenge the task poses. Dr Menon has found that children, adolescents and adults show progressively different patterns of brain activity which appear to reflect this improvement. He has discovered that a child whose brain is not maturing normally will show an unusual pattern of brain activation when performing the test. That reveals problems with brain development that an ordinary questionnaire-based psychological evaluation does not.
Nobody could object to such a worthy enterprise. But what about the following idea? Greg Siegle and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh are studying depression. In a paper published in this month's issue of Biological Psychiatry, they report that when depressed individuals are read a list of depressing words, they show a different response in a region of the brain called the amygdala from that displayed by “normal” individuals. The amygdalas of the depressed hum away for as long as 25 seconds after hearing a depressing word. Those of individuals who have never been depressed stop showing activity after ten seconds. Dr Siegle suggests that the depressed subjects ruminate on, or think repeatedly about, sad words, while the undepressed subjects simply move on.
Since the amygdala is known to be involved in processing emotion, that is not altogether startling. Suppose, though, that job-recruiting agencies were fitted with fMRI machines (unlikely at the moment, given their expense, but not unimaginable). An individual who wished to conceal evidence of depression from possible employers would have a much harder time doing so in the face of fMRI, than in the face of a little light form-filling.
Just as genetic markers can be associated with physical states, so features of brain scans will surely be linked to a wide variety of mental states
And that may only be the start. Just as genetic markers can be associated with physical states, so features of brain scans will surely be linked to a wide variety of mental states. fMRI screening might, for example, become a foolproof method of lie detection—one that could catch out even “astute liars” who pretend to have impaired memories when put under pressure by an interrogator. Other personality traits, such as tendencies to aggression or risk-aversion, could also yield their secrets to fMRI's probing glance.
Steal your face
Medical privacy is another area that brain scanning could compromise. One of the most immediate threats is a little-considered side-effect of the scanning process: that what is scanned and recorded is actually the head, and not merely the brain. In other words, a magnetic scan of a brain also contains enough information about the front of the skull to recreate a recognisable depiction of the scanned subject. The result is that, unlike a genetic profile, which does not, by itself, tell you who has been profiled, no magnetic-resonance image is inherently anonymous.
Neuroscientists are already building up databases of brain scans for research purposes.
In 2000 John Van Horn and Michael Gazzaniga, two cognitive neuroscientists at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, launched a database called the fMRI Data Centre, to help disseminate fMRI studies among scientists. They hope that it will spur discoveries in neuroscience in the same way that GenBank, a public database of gene sequences, has spurred discoveries in genetics. The fMRI Data Centre makes raw data from such studies available to researchers, and will soon organise the data so that interesting features can be extracted from it systematically. So far, says Dr Gazzaniga, roughly 400 researchers around the world have requested data from the centre. Those data are shipped to them on compact discs to do with as they please.
One answer to the lack of anonymity of magnetic-resonance images is to scramble the picture in the part of the image that contains facial information. The managers of the Dartmouth database do just that. Such scrambling, however, makes the data useless for some sorts of analysis. It is therefore questionable whether the operators of other databases of neuro-images (several are planned) will follow suit.
Pictures of perfection
Just as with genetics, however, the spectre that most terrifies many of those who fear the advance of neurotechnology is that it will one day be capable of “enhancing” human beings. Some worry that this may blunt the differences between individuals, turning society into one homogeneous mass. Others see the opposite risk—a Gattacesque division between the privileged and the unenhanced.
Potential dystopias always make good press. But drawing the line between necessary therapy and discretionary enhancement is genuinely difficult. Some argue that society accepted the idea of so-called “cosmetic psychopharmacology” when people first began using recreational drugs. Who has not perceived himself to be wittier and more attractive than normal when under the influence of alcohol—or, indeed, seen wit and attractiveness in others in the same circumstances?
Another argument is that drugs for the brain are simply one more step down a road taken by orthodontics, face lifts, Viagra and other medical extras. That may be so. But it could be a step in seven-league boots, for pharmaceutical companies are only just beginning to mine the spectrum of psychological ailments that flesh is heir to. Drugs to combat shyness, forgetfulness, sleepiness and stress are now in or close to clinical trials, not to mention better versions of drugs that have already swept society—what Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, calls “super-Prozacs”.
One example of the trend towards making the normal treatable is research into “mild cognitive impairment”, the kind of slight deterioration in memory that goes with getting old. Or that does for now, anyway. Many companies are hunting for drugs to fend off this sort of memory loss. Researchers at Cortex Pharmaceuticals in Irvine, California, for example, are exploring molecules known as ampakines. These attach themselves to nerve-cell proteins called AMPA receptors. That serves to amplify the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another. In particular, it amplifies the effect of a second protein, the NMDA receptor, which is known to be associated with learning. Meanwhile, Targacept, a firm based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is looking at another group of nerve-cell proteins, the nicotinergic receptors, whose activation has been shown to increase alertness and may fend off cognitive decline.
Another technology, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), also holds out the promise of enhancement. Since nerve cells use electrical signals, and magnetic fields can induce and disrupt such signals, a strong, well-aimed magnetic stimulation can affect the brain's operation. By holding a magnetic coil over somebody's skull, a researcher can affect the activity of the piece of cortex beneath, while causing no pain to the subject. Sending repeated magnetic pulses disrupts neural transmission in that area, in effect creating a small lesion on demand. Although nobody is quite sure how it works, there is evidence to suggest that certain kinds of TMS improve performance in memory and reasoning tasks.
The death of free will?
Screening, privacy and enhancement are all important issues, to be sure. For many critics, though, they are side-shows. The really uncomfortable questions raised by brain science are those that go to the heart of what it is to be human. Or, more specifically, what philosophers and theologians have claimed is the heart of what it is to be human.
In the West, at least, that defining quality is the concept of “free will”. Although some philosophers see free will as an illusion that helps people to interact with one another, others think it is genuine—in other words, that an individual faced with a particular set of circumstances really could take any one of a range of actions. That, however, sits uncomfortably with the idea that mental decisions are purely the consequence of electrochemical interactions in the brain, since the output of such interactions might be expected to be an inevitable consequence of the input. It also sits uncomfortably with the separate, but parallel, argument that correct moral choices are the result of a sort of biological decision-making programme, shaped by evolution, rather than being arrived at by abstract reasoning.
There are already cases where neurotechnology may have a practical effect on people's moral development
Whatever the philosophical arcana of the field, there are already cases where neurotechnology may have a practical effect on people's moral development. Erik Parens of the Hastings Centre, a think-tank in Garrison, New York, is concerned that it could, for example, “reduce the number of ways acceptable to be a person”.
To illustrate this point he says that the act of giving a normal, healthy child Ritalin, a drug used to treat so-called hyperactivity, is really “a substantive moral choice”, because it tells that child that he needs to change to be acceptable. If forgetfulness, xenophobia and a whole host of the other eccentricities that make up a person's character become optional traits rather than inevitable ones, people will be more inclined to discriminate against the bearers of those traits.
Discoveries in neuroscience may also have profound legal implications. Most courts, for example, accept a claim of insanity as a defence in certain criminal cases. If a propensity towards aggression or violence is shown to have a biological basis in the brain, a lawyer may argue that his client could not control his violent urges. Courts may be asked to treat brain-image data as exculpatory evidence, which shows that a suspect is not really guilty of a crime he has committed.
Donald Kennedy, a neuroscientist who is also editor of Science, says it is likely that “some extension of the domain of exculpatory conditions” will be made as a result of neuroscientific advances. In any case, each jurisdiction treats insanity claims in its own way, so they may well disagree over whether brain-image data are exculpatory. In Texas, for example, all that a prosecutor needs to demonstrate is that a suspect knew “the difference between right and wrong” at the time of the crime. Even individuals who are clearly insane can be found guilty if they meet this test.
Soul-searching questions
In many ways, therefore, thinkers who are wrestling with questions of free will, the soul and human nature are seeing the terms of their debate altered by modern brain science. But the history of the debate may offer consolation to those who fear that neurotechnology is a hair's breadth from catapulting society into a “post-human future”, as Francis Fukuyama termed it in the title of a recent book. The human soul—or its physiological equivalent—has proved surprisingly elusive.
René Descartes was a philosopher who believed that he had found the exact point in the brain where the body and soul meet. Rather unromantically, the structure he chose was the humble pineal gland. As the author of a popular textbook on the subject dryly notes, however, “this now seems unlikely because pineal tumours do not cause the changes one would expect to find associated with distortion of the soul.” There is a deal of searching to do yet before human nature gives up its secrets. http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1143317
[Edited 3 times, lastly by Dan Rockwell on 05-25-2002]
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