Word: braine
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Just in time. As brain science becomes increasingly sophisticated, the moral and legal quandaries it poses threaten to proliferate into every part of our lives. And as the racism experiment makes clear, brain imaging has already started to do so. Even in their current state, brain scans may be able to reveal, without our consent, hidden things about who we are and what we think and feel. "I don't have a problem with looking into your brain," says Alan Leshner, former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and current head of the American Association for the Advancement...
...device that might be helpful in personnel testing, for example, might not be rigorous enough to be used in a criminal trial, where the standard of proof is higher. That's currently the case with the polygraph. But Farah is afraid that because of the high-tech aura of brain scans, people may put more faith in them than is warranted...
Perhaps even more critical is the question of who should be allowed to peek into our brains. Employers? Schools? The government? The answers are far from clear. Employers, for example, already give psychological tests to job applicants, and schools test 3- and 4-year-olds to anticipate reading problems. Brain scans may actually give better results. But brain scans are also much more powerful and far more invasive, and the law is murky on whether they can be performed without our consent. We may feel instinctively that we have a right to brain privacy, but feelings have no legal standing...
...compelled to give a DNA sample. Nor can they be forced to submit to an MRI or have electrodes fixed to their skulls without consent or a court order, says Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor. But it's conceivable that prosecutors might become much more aggressive in demanding brain scans--"like a search warrant for the brain," he suggests. "There's little precedent, and we're moving into new and scary territory...
...technology also has national-security implications. At a Neuroethics Society-- sponsored symposium at Tufts University last September, ethicists and policymakers debated the potential benefits and threats to individual liberty of brain imaging and stimulation during intelligence gathering, which may be just around the corner. Cephos Corp., a brain-imaging firm based in Pepperell, Mass., hopes to have a lie-detection scan with 90% accuracy ready for use by late 2007, according to CEO Steven Laken, who says the U.S. intelligence community is watching closely. "If someone says, 'I know where bin Laden is,'" Laken asserts, "the U.S. government could hire...