APPLETON, WIS. — The gray intersection of neuroscience and government-sponsored research in the name of national security will be explored in the final address of Lawrence University’s annual Edward F. Mielke Lecture Series in Biomedical Ethics.
Noted bioethicist Jonathan Moreno presents “Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense,” Friday, March 30 at 7 p.m. in Lawrence’s Wriston Art Center auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.
Based on his 2006 book of the same name, the talk will focus on Moreno’s investigation into the ways U.S. defense agencies are utilizing cutting-edge brain research to harness the human nervous system as a weapon against its enemies.
Among the projects Moreno will discuss are virus-transported molecules called “neuroweapons” that fatally infect the brain, the development of drugs that repress emotional reactions to violence, “anti-sleep” medications that can enhance soldiers’ battlefield performances and brain machine interface devices that relay images and sounds between human brains and machines.
He also will discuss the ethical and political issues emerging from the partnership of government and neuroscience. Moreno believes there is a need for the establishment of some kind of “neurosecurity” board that would oversee the use of emerging technology.
According to Moreno, “regulating the introduction of devices spun off from neuroscience is going to be one of the big social policy challenges of this century. With military and intelligence needs on the cutting edge of these developments, the policy challenges are going to be still more daunting.”
Moreno joined the University of Pennsylvania in January as the holder of the David and Lyn Silfen University Professorship. He had spent the previous eight years as the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. At Penn, Moreno holds appointments in both the School of Medicine (medical ethics) and in the School of Arts and Sciences (history and sociology of science).
He also has held faculty appointments at Swarthmore College, the University of Texas, George Washington University and the SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn.
He is a former president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, serves as a bioethics advisor for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He has been an advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and served as senior policy and research analyst for the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments.
In addition to “Mind Wars,” Moreno has written seven other books, among them “In the Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis” and “Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and psychology from Hofstra University and was a University Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1977.
Moreno’s appearance is supported by the Edward F. Mielke Lectureship in Ethics in Medicine, Science and Society. The lectureship was established in 1985 by the Mielke Family Foundation in memory of Dr. Edward F. Mielke, a leading member of the Appleton medical community and the founder of the Appleton Medical Center.
