The complexities and controversies surrounding advances in sciences and particularly brain research were the focus of an interview on Wednesday, April 20, 2006, on the Charlie Rose television program, with Dana Alliance member, Michael Gazzaniga, Ph.D., director of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind at UC Santa Barbara. William Safire, chairman of the Dana Foundation, hosted for Rose. Under discussion were stem cell research, neuroethics, arts and cognition, and the future direction of brain research.
Gazzaniga, author of The Ethical Brain, and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, called for stronger support of stem cell research and funding and said he did not consider the current system to be fair. Stem cell research has created headlines both for its potential and because it uses embryonic cells, which has brought it under attack in some quarters.
Under current White House guidelines taxpayer funds may be used for a limited number of stem cell lines though individual states, private institutions, and universities are allowed to fund additional research. Gazzaniga said, “It is far too limited in the amount of investment that’s needed to really bring the science to fruition.”
He added that while the States were stepping up it is a minor amount of money compared to what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) can do. “The big biomedical machine in the world is the budget of the NIH,” according to Gazzaniga.
Gazzaniga commented that the number of cell lines available is minor and that “ultimately we have to develop, in the ultimate science, cell lines for each individual. “So there’s so much more to do, and there’s such a larger amount of money that’s needed to solve this problem. It’s just not being done right now.”
Part of the interview centered on Gazzaniga’s book, The Ethical Brain, and his work in neuroethics. Asked if there was part of the brain that controls ethical behavior, a “zone of conscience,” Gazzaniga said “ethical behavior is an almost timeless issue and raises the question of whether that behavior is inherent or emerges out of social processes. He said there were examples of both, some developing from a sense of personal responsibility and others coming from a set of rules set from a social group.
“Years of research,” Gazzaniga said, “have shown that there’s something in our left brain that is unique to it, and what it does is try to interpret our moods, our actions, and it builds a theory about who we are, how we are interacting in our culture. It becomes a source of developing your personal story.”
Gazzaniga believes that science will look at these moral questions, with new research, including imaging, and eventually find out why “we humans behave the way we do.”
Safire asked Gazzaniga with evidence growing about how we’re driven by our genes and biology, why does Gazzaniga still think free will is alive and well. Gazzaniga said, “Neuroscience should butt out of the courtroom. I don’t think it has anything to say on the question. And the reason is that what you have when you have someone who has committed a crime and you say they may have—some kind of neurologic disorder, is you’re having a correlation between the neurologic disorder and the potential of the crime.
But, we now know that the frequency with which people with particular neurologic disorders actually engage in violent crime, while it may go up a little bit, it is nowhere near a perfect correlation. So, if you say Jones kills Smith and Jones has brain damage and you want to make him exculpable because he has brain damage, but the problem is that there are millions of people like Jones, who have the same amount of brain damage who haven’t killed anybody. So how can you make that argument?”
Gazzaniga continued, “You can see how a clever defense or a prosecutor in the future can turn that argument around and give people with a certain brain damage license to carry out a crime….so it’s a very dangerous game to play, and a lot of us are against it being played.”
As he looks to the future, Gazzaniga believes that social neuroscience will be a major focus of brain research. “We are just a sea of social processes,” he said. “While these (social processes) have been studied in psychological terms, new brain technologies (will give us) actual knowledge about brain mechanisms and we’re going to answer a lot of questions on the human condition,” he added.
One other important area of study is the relationship of arts and cognition. Gazzaniga is heading a consortium of six research institutions, funded by the Dana Foundation, studying the effects of arts training on the brain. The scientists are looking at whether there is a causative relationship, not just a correlative one, between arts training in another domain, such as language or math.
The study is about a year and a half along. Gazzaniga said that some results might be available in 2007. “In science,” he said, “you just wait to see what the data tells you. But, there’s promising evidence that there’s going to be a true relationship that’s causative in nature, and that’s going to be very exciting, if that’s true.”