Practical Ethics

The point of death

The Guardian yesterday reported the death of the man who had been so tragically shot in Antigua, with his wife, three weeks after their wedding. It began like this:

"Ben Mullany, the newlywed who was shot on honeymoon in Antigua in an attack that killed his wife, Catherine, died in hospital in Wales yesterday after his life support machine was switched off.  The 31-year-old trainee physiotherapist, who had suffered a fractured skull and had a bullet lodged in the back of his head, was flown back to Britain while in a coma on Saturday. Tests carried out when his condition stabilised after the 24-hour journey established he was brain dead." 

This is a familiar way of describing such happenings, even among clinical professionals.   Brain death is pronounced, so the life support machine is switched off, and the patient dies.   The clear implication is that brain death is not death.  The machine is still keeping the patient alive, and it is switching off the machine that causes real death. 

Brain Boosting and Cheating in Exams: Four Responses

A report by the Academy of Medical Sciences looking at different aspects of drug use and mental health has identified a growing trend for off-label use of drugs intended for the treatment of diseases including narcolepsy, ADHD and Alzheimer’s. The use of such drugs by a healthy individual can improve memory, alertness and concentration. While the report does not condemn the practice, it raises a number of potential concerns over safety, and fairness. Professor Les Iversen, report co-author, highlighted concerns that the use of enhancement in exams would unfairly advantage wealthier students, and suggested that the use of such drugs could be considered cheating. The report recommends that legislation is prepared to tackle the misuse of such drugs, including the potential for urine testing in schools and universities.

Below are responses from Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom, Anders Sandberg and Mark Sheehan on the effects of cognitive enhancing drugs, and the issue of cheating

New hope or false hope for vegetative patients?

A BBC documentary screening this evening on the ‘Inside Out’ program reports on what it describes as a breakthrough for patients in a vegetative state. It is based upon research by a group of neuroscientists in Cambridge, who have used sophisticated brain scans (functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)) to look for signs of consciousness in patients who have previously been thought to be completely unaware of their surroundings.

Trading on Testosterone: Doping and the Financial Markets

Two cambridge researchers have found that  found that the amount of money a male financial trader makes in a day is correlated with his testosterone level. The pair - John Coates and Joe Herbert - also found that a trader's testosterone at the beginning of a day is strongly predictive of his success that day, suggesting that testosterone causes improved stock market performance, rather than the reverse.

Changing the Building Blocks of Life: Playing God and Being gods

All life on earth has the same simple basic structure. It is based on the genetic code contained in DNA. The differences in DNA between a toad and Albert Einstein are what determines their different properties.

The active ingredients in DNA are also simple. They are 4 bases: cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine, or A, T, C and G. The order of these 4 bases is what determines the characteristics of life, the differences between Einstein and a toad.

Scientists in California have created two new bases in addition to A, T, C and G: dSICS and DMMO2. These new bases function like natural ones, they pair appropriately with their partner and are faithfully copied by the natural enzyme, DNA polymerase, responsible for making the billions of copies of DNA necessary to programme each cell in the body of a living organism.

At present, these new bases or building blocks do not do anything. But scientists hope they could be used

"for hundreds of purposes: for example, to build complex shapes, to build complex nanostructures, silence disease genes or even perform calculations… [and even]expand the genetic code and ‘evolvability’ of an organism."

Neuro-babble

A study published in this week’s issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience finds that including irrelevant neuroscientific information in an explanation can make people more likely to believe that explanation.

Three groups of subjects – neuroscience ‘novices’, neuroscience students, and neuroscience experts – were given descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of the following types of explanation:

I. A good explanation excluding irrelevant neuroscientific information

II. A good explanation including irrelevant information

III. A bad explanation excluding irrelevant neuroscientific information

IV. A bad explanation including irrelevant information.

Novices rated bad explanations to be more satisfying when they contained neuroscientific information (i.e. IV > III) while students rated both good and bad explanations more satisfying when the contained irrelevant neuroscientific information (i.e. IV > III and II > I). No similar effect was found for experts, who in fact rated good explanations to be less satisfying when they included irrelevant neuroscientific information (i.e. I > II).

That neuroscientific novices may be persuaded by neuro-babble is, of course, troubling.

Exercise Cures Depression: Mens Sana In Corpore Sano

Exercise has long been recommended to alleviate depression, but now scientists from Yale University have isolated a gene (VGF) within the hippocampus area of the brain which is responsible for these effects, leading to hope of a new, more effective cure for depression. 

Feeling good about the failure of others

The journal Science last week published a study indicating that the reward centres in our brains are highly sensitive to the success of others. In the study, 19 pairs of subjects were presented with a task involving the estimation of the number of dots on a screen, and were then provided with feedback about their perfromance and about a monetary payment that they would receive. They were also provided with the same information about the other member of the pair. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to ascertain the effects of this feedback on blood flow in the midbrain-striatal and midbrain-prefrontal dopaminergic projections - parts of the brain implicated in generating subjective rewards, such as positive feelings, in response to achievement. The researchers analysed the cases in which both members of the pair were successful on the task and found that, in such cases, the reward centres activated more strongly in response to a given payment when the other member of the pair received a lower payment than when the other received an identical or higher payment.

The main conclusion that the authors draw from this finding is that it supports the widely held view that subjective rewards are sensitive to the success of others, at least where success is measured in financial terms. Existing studies claiming to support this view have faced difficulties in, among other things, measuring subjective rewards, but the authors of the Science article suggest they they can avoid this difficulty by using activation of the reward centres as an objective proxy for subjective feelings.

Lie-detection using functional MRI

Scientific American last week reported that psychiatrist Sean Spence and collaborators at the University of Sheffield are developing a lie-detection test based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. Using fMRI, Spence and colleagues are able to monitor blood flow to certain areas of the brain's prefrontal cortex that are implicated in the regulation of truth telling, spotting patterns of blood flow associated with lying or witholding the truth. The technique promises to outperform existing polygraph technology, which relies on signs of anxiety that are notoriously unreliable indicators of lying. It has already been used on the British reality TV show Lie Lab, though Spence emphasizes that it is not yet ready for widespread forensic use.

In the United States, the commercialization of fMRI lie-detection tests by two companies - 'No Lie MRI' and 'Cephos' - has already provoked some ethical worries.

One concern is that fMRI lie detection will be adopted before there is good information on its reliability. The thought is that undue significance might be attached to results which are in fact highly uncertain. But suppose that the fMRI approach could be developed into a lie-detection test that far outstrips polygraphs in reliability. Would its use remain problematic?

Some worry that the technology might be misused by, for example, anti-terrorism agencies. Such agencies might be tempted to apply the test in situations where its use would amount to a gross infraction on individual privacy and autonomy. This is a real worry, but it applies equally to existing lie-detection technology which, though controversial, has been widely used. It's not clear why misuse of a more reliable test should be more problematic than misuse of a less reliable one.

Another concern is that it is difficult to define lying or truth-telling in a precise and uncontroversial way. But it's also difficult to define many personality traits or motives that serve as grounds for suspicion in criminal investigations. Yet judgments about personality or motive are routinely made in such investigations. If investigators were prevented from making judgments that rely on poorly defined concepts, their forensic capabilities would be drastically limited.

Finally, concerns about the risk of exaggerating the reliability of test results might remain; even a fully developed fMRI lie-detection test would surely give some false positives and false negatives. But again, it's not clear why the reliability of an fMRI test would be exaggerated any more than, say, the reliability of existing polygraph technology, or the various other technologies routinely used by forensic scientists. The tendency of some to exaggerate the reliability of technology-based tests has been a longstanding problem in forensics, and it's one that should certainly be confronted. But it hasn't generally be seen as a good ground for rejecting new technologies, presumably because the benefits of those technologies have been thought to outweigh the risks of misinterpretation.

The possibility of an fMRI lie-detection test certainly raises some ethical issues. But its not clear that any of these issues are new, nor that the ethical concerns surrounding the use of such a test would be any greater than those surrounding the use of existing forensic technologies.

Main sources:

L. Greenemeier, Are you a liar? Ask your brain. Scientific American, 15 November 2007. Available at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=lie-brain-fmri-polygraph&page=1

Lure of lie detectors spooks ethicists, Nature 441, 918-919; 22 June 2006. Available at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441918a.html

Background:

D. D. Langleben et al. NeuroImage 15, 727–732; 2002

J. Wild. Nature 437, 457; 2005

F. A. Kozel et al. Biol. Psychiatry 58, 605–613; 2005

E. Check. Nature 435, 254-255; 2005

J. Knight. Nature 428, 692-694; 2004