Call for "neuroethics" as science races ahead

By Tom Heneghan

PARIS (Reuters) - Neuroscientists are making such rapid progress in unlocking the brain's secrets that some are urging colleagues to debate the ethics of their work before it can be misused by governments, lawyers or advertisers.

The news that brain scanners can now read a person's intentions before they are expressed or acted upon has given a new boost to the fledgling field of neuroethics that hopes to help researchers separate good uses of their work from bad.

The same discoveries that could help the paralysed use brain signals to steer a wheelchair or write on a computer might also be used to detect possible criminal intent, religious beliefs or other hidden thoughts, these neuroethicists say.

"The potential for misuse of this technology is profound," said Judy Illes, director of the Stanford University neuroethics programme in California. "This is a truly urgent situation."

The new boost came from a research paper published last week that showed neuroscientists can now not only locate the brain area where a certain thought occurs but probe into that area to read out some kinds of thought occurring there.

Its author, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, compared this to learning how to read books after simply being able to find them before. "That is a huge step," he said.

Haynes hastened to add that neuroscience is still far from developing a scanner that could easily read random thoughts.

"But what we can do is read out some simple things that are quite useful for applications, such as simple intentions, attitudes or emotional states," he said. "We're finding we can read out yes-or-no situations."