Ethical Issues
January 9th, 2008
While researchers are on their way to perhaps one day erase one specific memory, they are clearly aware that they’re working on a tool that can be used for good or evil. They would certainly hope that in the case of memory impairment, it would be used to help ease suffering, not to generate problems. When asked about any of their ethical concerns, some state that the purpose of Science is to test ideas and to generate new understanding ignoring whether it is good or bad. How it is applied then, is for the ethicists to decide.
Michael S. Gazzangia, author of “The Ethical Brain”, and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, disagrees. He thinks that it is the neuroscientists’ responsibility to get implicated in ethical decisions. Before writing his book, Gazzangia participated in the new Council on Bioethics launched by President George W. Bush after September 11. Most of the discussion in neuro-ethics so far had been among non-scientists. Gazzangia thought it was time for neuroscientists to jump into the fray. He would define neuro-ethics as “the examination of how [the neuroscientists] want to deal with the social issues of disease, normality, mortality, lifestyle, and the philosophy of living informed by [their] understanding of underlying brain mechanisms.” In his book, he insists on the fact that neuro-ethics is not a discipline that seeks resources for medical cure, “but one that places personal responsibility in the broadest social and biological context.”
The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, based in California, follows Gazzangia’s idea in gathering experts from lawyers to researchers in psychiatry.
The multi-disciplinary group believes that freedom of thought will be the next big civil issue. The experts question whether the legal system is prepared to deal with the changes that drugs, that would safely erase unwanted memories would bring. Richard Glen Boire, Legal Counsel for the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, wrote in an email that drugs or technologies that reduce or erase memory raise new legal dilemmas that society should be preparing for now. “Just like the printing press and the Internet changed the parameters of free speech, memory erasing drugs and other neuro- pharmaceuticals currently under development are going to change the parameters of freedom of thought.”
The group asks whether memory-erasing drugs should be prohibited or not. The consequence might be the birth of an underground market developed by street dealers; then maybe patients other than just trauma victims would try to dull painful memories.
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