The revolutionary advances that are increasing man`s ability to understand and manipulate the brain are forcing society into an uncomfortable reappraisal of what it means to be human.
Exciting discoveries are deciphering the molecular basis of the things that make people what they are: thought, emotion, behavior and personality. Human intelligence has superseded natural selection as the primary driving force of evolution, and the powerful tools of modern science are shifting the emphasis from the survival of the fittest to the engineering of the fittest.
”Down the road we`re going to be able to make any kind of person we want using molecular biology,” said Richard Masland, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. ”Society is going to have to face that.
”We`re going to be able to create from birth a person who is tall, has blue eyes and an IQ of 400. The technology is going to happen to do that. The people who are going to develop those techniques are going to do it in order to cure mental diseases and other disorders. But once they`ve learned how to do it, the Pandora`s box will be open.”
The brain, as it guides and controls man`s activities, is reshaping the Earth. Unlike the genetically controlled behavior of lower animals, the brain is able to accumulate information with each generation, giving man an increasingly vast power for change, both good and bad.
The nuclear bomb is just the most spectacular of many ways that humanity is capable of destroying itself, writes Walter Truett Anderson in his book
”To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal.”
”The future of the biosphere is inseparable from the future of the human mind,” he said. ”The destiny of every species and every ecosystem depends on what kind of progress is made in the realm of human thought and action.”
The last 10 to 15 years have witnessed the development of more information about the brain than in all previous history. It is an opportunity for man to get to know himself and his place in the universe, and it is likely to generate an unprecedented number of ethical issues.
In the time of Charles Darwin more than a century ago, many people were repelled at the notion that the human form was not uniquely created but evolved from lower animals, says Eric Kandel, a Columbia University neuroscientist.
”More recently, there has been difficulty with the narcissistically even more disturbing notion that the mental processes of humans have also evolved from those of animal ancestors, and that mentation is not ethereal, but can be explained in terms of nerve cells and their interconnections,” he said.
Some of the new developments in neuroscience are quickly being entangled with existing ethical debates. The growing prospect of transplanting brain tissue from aborted fetuses into the brains of patients with Parkinson`s or Alzheimer`s disease, for instance, is adding new fuel to the abortion issue. And the new link between defective genes and mental illnesses will spur fresh controversy over genetic screening-similar to the opposition that arose among blacks to genetic screening for sickle cell anemia.
Other new discoveries have no precedent, and society will have to struggle with them for the first time.
Technology that permits scientists to look inside the living human brain may be able to detect learning disabilities, mental disorders, deteriorating mental function and, possibly, a person`s mental talents. This same technology could be used to screen people for jobs, determine their careers, and pigeonhole people who are not up to par.
”We`re probably on the verge of some of the unthinkable things,” said Dr. Frank Sullivan, former acting director of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.
”They`ll be doing things 20 years from now that we would be aghast at, like definitive brain scanning for particular disorders. Instead of going to a psychiatrist and having him give you some tests, you`ll go to a drugstore and sit yourself down at a machine and find out.”
Drugs that increase learning and memory may be available only to the rich and powerful who want to make themselves and their offspring smarter. Other drugs that control aggression and criminal behavior may profoundly change our ideas of crime and punishment.
Anything that can be conceived of, from mind control and super lie detectors to curing mental disorders and increasing intelligence, is entering the realm of the possible.
”The question is, is our knowledge about the brain outstripping the ability of our brain to understand it?” said Dr. David Olton, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. ”I hope not. To me, the most exciting outcome of this area is the realization that the brain is flexible and that we can alter it directly for adaptive reasons.”
Tampering with the brain has already made possible one of society`s biggest moral dilemmas: homelessness. It was the accidental discovery of the first antipsychotic drugs in the mid 1950s that allowed politicians to open the doors of mental institutions. Patients were given prescriptions but little or no follow-up, and they poured out into communities. Former mental patients and others with similar severe psychiatric disorders make up one-quarter to one-half of the homeless.
The discovery of antipsychotic drugs is a classic example of the double-headed phenomenon these new breakthroughs can be. The drugs helped tens of thousands of mentally ill people return to normal lives and focused attention on the biological causes of mental disorders, but they also gave state governments an excuse to wash their hands of the mentally ill and reduce costs to the taxpayers.
”Whenever there is a massive scientific advance, it always brings with it great opportunities but also enormous responsibilities and questions that need to be answered,” said Dr. Lewis Judd, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.
”Important ethical issues will emerge as to how these advances are to be understood and applied, and how they fit in in terms of our concepts of mankind and man in his society.”
Encouraged by their dramatic successes, scientists are becoming more optimistic that the brain eventually may be able to understand itself.
”I believe that that will happen,” said Dr. Daniel Alkon, codirector of the laboratory of cellular and molecular biology at the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke.
”At this stage it is very helpful to have a basic humility about it,”
he said. ”As exciting as developments are, we are still at the dawning of a new age of understanding.
”With that new information, we are going to be challenged to retain our human and moral capacities. Our past experience has shown that, the more power we have, the more opportunity there is for abuse. Unless we retain some of that humility-and recognize that we are in a grand scheme that we never put together, but that we have the blessing of being able to try to understand-there are potentially great dangers in the future.”
Attempting to assess some of those dangers, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment last year issued two reports that a short time ago would have been grist for science fiction novels.
One, called ”Science, Technology and the Constitution,” concludes that scientific advances will test the U.S. Constitution in novel ways. The framers of the Constitution in 1787 never envisioned the tremendous powers that science has relentlessly developed to explore the universe, the atom, the genetic code and the brain.
”Technology gives us the tools to explore these frontiers, allowing us to modify not just our environment, as man has always done, but the human body, behavior, brain and the whole of our genetic heritage on a scale that is unprecedented,” said the report.
Science can manipulate chemical factors in human behavior, measure human abilities, and predict human performance with increasing power and precision, it said.
”Can we look to the world of 2087 with confidence that the Constitution will meet the challenges of its third century and will continue to be a strong bulwark against abuse of both political and technological power?”
