In a clinical trial in Toronto, Canada, 12 out of 20 patients who had stimulating electrodes placed in a brain area called the subcallosal cingulated gyrus showed significant improvement in their depression, with seven of them going into full remission. (Nature)

Today’s neuroscientists need more than laboratory skills to discover how the brain works. Professor Judy Illes from the University of British Columbia describes the ‘critical challenges’ that the ethics of neuroscience - neuroethics - presents. (MedicExchange)

The Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, led by experts from ethics, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry and legal theory, will be the first international centre in the UK dedicated to neuroethical research. Research will focus on questions about the enhancement of cognition and mood; borderline consciousness and severe brain impairment; free will, criminal responsibility, and addiction; and the neural basis of moral decision-making. (University of Oxford)

The use of antipsychotic drugs to tamp down the agitation, combative behavior and outbursts of dementia patients has soared, especially in the elderly. Sales of newer antipsychotics like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa totaled $13.1 billion in 2007, up from $4 billion in 2000, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. (New York Times)

Bioethics (July 2008, Vol. 22 Issue 6) is now available by subscription only.

researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions. (ScienceDaily)

Researchers are again using mind-bending drugs as a means of treating mental disorders. (DISCOVER)

The debate over whether kids should be tried and punished as adults has simmered for years. The discussion is intensifying, however, because of recent discoveries that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which governs reasoning, develops more slowly than the limbic system, where the emotions reside. (Washington Post)

Surprisingly large numbers of people appear to be using brain-enhancing drugs to work harder, longer and better. They’re popping pills normally prescribed for narcolepsy or attention-deficit disorder to improve their performance at work and school. (Wired)

No matter how hard you try, your mind can’t bend a spoon or channel the powers of a Jedi knight. Thanks to a new headset under development by neuroengineering company Emotiv Systems, however, you may soon be able to do this and more via the magic of video games. (Scientific American)

By scanning the brains of test subjects as they pressed one button or another – though not a computer mouse – researchers pinpointed a signal that divulged the decision about seven seconds before people ever realised their choice. The discovery has implications for mind-reading, and the nature of free will. ( New Scientist)

Twenty percent of scientists admit to using performance-enhancing prescription drugs for non-medical reasons, according to a survey released Wednesday by Nature, Britain’s top science journal. (AFP)

Parkinson’s Patients who received fetal cadaver tissue grafts and whose brains were studied after they died, showed that the disease continued to affect healthy tissue and thus cell grafts may not function long term. From the story:

“These findings give us a bit of pause for the value of cell replacement strategy for Parkinson’s disease,” said [study lead author Jeffrey] Kordower. “We still need to vigorously investigate this approach among the full armament of surgically-delivered Parkinson’s disease therapies. While it is not clear to us whether the same fate would befall stem cell grafts, the next generation of cell replacement procedures, this study does suggest that grafted cells can be affected by the disease process.”…

The individual described in this article was a woman with a 22-year history of Parkinson’s disease who underwent transplantation in 1993. After transplantation she experienced improvements in disease symptoms as measured by the Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) and required substantially lower doses of antiparkinsonian medications. Her UPDRS scores remained improved into1997, but by 2004, she experienced progressive worsening of Parkinson’s disease symptoms. She died in 2007 and her brain and that of two other patients in the study were comprehensively processed and analyzed. She had the longest survival after transplantation that had been reported to date among this study’s participants.

In other trials, fetal cells proved to cause so many side effects in some patients that they never were developed into a regular treatment for Parkinson’s.

In any event, this is why I am generally hesitant to speak of “cures” when speaking of stem cell-related regenerative medical experiments, preferring the word “treatment,” since as a non scientist observing the scene, it seems to me that the studies show amelioration of symptoms more than cures.

This is no small thing, of course. Take the example of Dennis Turner. He received a treatment for Parkinson’s with his own neural stem cells to apparent great effect for several years. His level of medication reduced. He was able to lead a vigorous life at a time when he had expected to be disabled. But eventually, the symptoms of his Parkinson’s returned, just like the patient mentioned in the study.

It could be that some of these diseases may remain chronic conditions with repeated cell infusions a standard method of keeping the worst symptoms at bay. Time will tell, but I can think of a lot worse scenarios.

The human mind has always been an object of study, and seeing how the average person uses only 10 percent of their brain, we cannot control our own consciousness. But, what if there are those who can control all the minds in the world and manipulate every individual? If this sounds like an excerpt from a sci-fi film, there are records of researches and experiments with the human mind. There are more and more mind control methods today and they are mostly used fro military purposes. (Javno)

Neuroethics (Volume 1, Number 1, March, 2008) is now available online.

Articles include:
“Introducing Neuroethics” by Neil Levy, 1-8
“Neuroethics and the Problem of Other Minds: Implications of Neuroscience for the Moral Status of Brain-Damaged Patients and Nonhuman Animals” by Martha J. Farah, 9-18
“Neuroimaging and Inferential Distance” by Adina L. Roskies, 19-30
“Neuroenhancement of Love and Marriage: The Chemicals Between Us” by Julian Savulescu and Anders Sandberg, 31-44
“Psychopharmacological Enhancement” by Walter Glannon, 45-54
“Neuroethics and Nanoethics: Do We Risk Ethical Myopia?” by Sheri Alpert, 55-68
“Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism” by Cordelia Fine, 69-72

The ability to see requires healthy eyes, but it also requires that signals can get from the eyes to the parts of the brain involved in vision. A Boston neuroscientist hopes to deliver a ray of hope to the blind by bypassing eyes and optic nerves damaged by illness or head trauma and sending image information directly to the regions of the brain that process them. (Scientific American)

Take the most complex organ in the human body, superimpose the legacy of biology’s biggest research project, and what have you got? An unprecedented brain map that is set to transform studies of neuroscience and brain disease. (New Scientist)

How and why women and men are different is a topic of enduring scientific and public interest. Over the past decade, the number of neuroscience studies documenting sex differences in brain anatomy, chemistry, and function, and involving cognitive domains such as emotion, memory, and learning, has exploded (Cahill 2006). Although scholars in the field of neuroethics have explored advances in neuroscience from many angles, few, if any, have paid attention to neuroscientific work on sex differences or to gender as a primary category of analysis. (AJOB)

A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.

The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test. (BBC)

When human umbilical cord blood cells (UCBC) were injected into aged laboratory animals, researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) found improvements in the microenvironment of the hippocampus region of the animals’ brains and a subsequent rejuvenation of neural stem/progenitor cells. (Medical News Today)

So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors’ urine. And if there are illicit trainers on campuses, shady tutors with wraparound sunglasses and ties to basement labs in Italy, no one has exposed them.

Yet an era of doping may be looming in academia, and it has ignited a debate about policy and ethics that in some ways echoes the national controversy over performance enhancement accusations against elite athletes like Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. (New York Times)