Of Ethical Frameworks and Neuroethics in Big Neuroscience Projects: A View from the HBP

Translational Neuroethics: A Vision for a More Integrated, Inclusive, and Impactful Field

As early-career neuroethicists, we come to the field of neuroethics at a unique moment: we are well-situated to consider nearly two decades of neuroethics scholarship and identify challenges that have persisted across time. But we are also looking squarely ahead, embarking on the next generation of exciting and productive neuroethics scholarship. In this article, we both reflect backwards and turn our gaze forward. First, we highlight criticisms of neuroethics, both from scholars within the field and outside it, that have focused on speculation and lack of skepticism; the dearth of consideration of broader social issues such as justice and equality, both with regard to who speaks for neuroethics as a field and who benefits from its recommendations and findings; and the insufficient focus on the practical impact of our ethical work. Second, we embrace the concept of "translational neuroethics" to outline a vision for neuroethics that is integrated, inclusive, and impactful. Integration can help us identify more pertinent, real-world issues, and move away from speculation; inclusivity can help ensure that the questions we attend to are not merely relevant to a single subgroup but aim toward just distribution of benefits; and impact can help us think beyond guidelines and recommendations to focus on implementation. Our goal is for this call to action to help shape neuroethics into a discipline that develops rigorous research agendas through relationships with interdisciplinary partners, that is broadly inclusive and attends to issues beyond novel neurotechnologies, and that is devoted to the translation of scholarship into practice.

A comparative review on neuroethical issues in neuroscientific and neuroethical journals

This study is a pilot literature review that compares the interest of neuroethicists and neuroscientists. It aims to determine whether there is a significant gap between the neuroethical issues addressed in philosophical neuroethics journals and neuroscience journals. We retrieved 614 articles from two specialist neuroethics journals (Neuroethics and AJOB Neuroscience) and 82 neuroethics-focused articles from three specialist neuroscience journals (Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and Nature Reviews Neuroscience). We classified these articles in light of the neuroethical issue in question before we compared the neuroethical issues addressed in philosophical neuroethics with those addressed by neuroscientists. A notable result is a parallelism between them as a general tendency. Neuroscientific articles cover most neuroethical issues discussed by philosophical ethicists and vice versa. Subsequently, there are notable discrepancies between the two bodies of neuroethics literature. For instance, theoretical questions, such as the ethics of moral enhancement and the philosophical implications of neuroscientific findings on our conception of personhood, are more intensely discussed in philosophical-neuroethical articles. Conversely, neuroscientific articles tend to emphasize practical questions, such as how to successfully integrate ethical perspectives into scientific research projects and justifiable practices of animal-involving neuroscientific research. These observations will help us settle the common starting point of the attempt at "ethics integration" in emerging neuroscience, contributing to better governance design and neuroethical practice.

An XYZ-axis Matrix Approach for the Integration of Neuroscience and Neuroethics

The recent, unprecedented advancement in neuroscience has led to new discoveries about the human brain and its function. Yet at the same time, it has spurred novel ethical and regulatory issues, and the field of neuroethics has emerged as an interdisciplinary endeavor to address these issues. Across the globe, extensive efforts have been underway to achieve the integration of neuroscience and Neuroethics, with active engagement not only from academia but also from the government, the public, and industry. However, in some countries, integrating neuroscience and neuroethics has proved to be a particularly challenging task. For example, in South Korea, the government has primarily driven the integration effort, and only a small group of researchers is properly trained for conducting an interdisciplinary evaluation of ethical, legal, social, and cultural implications (ELSCI) of neurotechnology. On the basis of the last few years of experience pursuing a government-funded neuroethics project in South Korea, we developed a new operational framework to provide practical guidance on ELSCI research. This framework consists of the X, Y, and Z axes; the X-axis represents a target neurotechnology, the Y-axis represents different developmental stages of the technology, and the Z-axis represents ELSCI issues that may arise from the development and use of the neurotechnology. Here we also present a step-by-step workflow to apply this matrix framework, from organizing a panel for a target neurotechnology to facilitating stakeholder discussion through public hearings. This framework will enable meaningful integration of neuroscience and neuroethics to promote responsible innovation in neuroscience and neurotechnology.

How Neurotech Start-Ups Envision Ethical Futures: Demarcation, Deferral, Delegation

Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society-from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping-are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses-and especially start-ups-address ethics in tech development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology's actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology's benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of 'ethical realities' in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology.

International data governance for neuroscience

As neuroscience projects increase in scale and cross international borders, different ethical principles, national and international laws, regulations, and policies for data sharing must be considered. These concerns are part of what is collectively called data governance. Whereas neuroscience data transcend borders, data governance is typically constrained within geopolitical boundaries. An international data governance framework and accompanying infrastructure can assist investigators, institutions, data repositories, and funders with navigating disparate policies. Here, we propose principles and operational considerations for how data governance in neuroscience can be navigated at an international scale and highlight gaps, challenges, and opportunities in a global brain data ecosystem. We consider how to approach data governance in a way that balances data protection requirements and the need for open science, so as to promote international collaboration through federated constructs such as the International Brain Initiative (IBI).