National Security, Neuroscience and Bioethics

In his book Mind Wars, bioethicist Jonathan Moreno tells why the defense industry is interested in new discoveries in neuroscience. He explores why the defense department funds brain research, and what scientists should do about it.

Published November 27, 2006

By Adrienne Burke
Academy Contributor

Jonathan Moreno was first exposed to brain research as a child. He was 10 when two dozen subjects arrived at the 20-acre sanitorium run by his father, a distinguished psychiatrist, who would observe the effects of LSD on the group.

Little wonder that Moreno has spent a career thinking about the ethics of medical research. As a Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia, and Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics there, Moreno has penned books including In the Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis; Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans; Ethical and Regulatory Aspects of Clinical Research; and Deciding Together: Bioethics and Moral Consensus.

Lately, his curiosity has been piqued by the attention that the defense department pays to brain research. His new book, Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense, explores the possible national security implications that stem from high-tech neuroscience, and reveals how much of it is funded by defense dollars.

Moreno urges neuroscientists to consider all of the possible applications and misapplications of their work, and to engage in the policymaking process.

The Academy spoke with Moreno in advance of his November 28, 2006 lecture.

You say that in 2006, most Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding has gone to brain-related work.

Much, I wouldn’t say most, but much. It’s clear that DARPA has an interest in neuroscience, which they should.

As you point out, DARPA funding has resulted in great technologies for the public good. What are the problems, risks, or ethical dilemmas with having neuroscience research funded by a defense agency?

One of the biggest problems is that there is so much anxiety—and in many cases paranoia—about the whole notion of mind-control or mind-reading. And I can tell you from this work and from previous work that I’ve done that there are a lot of people who think that they are the victims of mind-control experiments by the CIA. And this is actually cross-cultural; it is not confined to the United States. I was in Pakistan last year and I had a long conversation with the chairman of the Clinical Research department at Karachi University and I asked if he encountered patients who believed that [they were victims of mind control experiments]. He said, “oh yeah, it’s everywhere.”

So one problem of talking about this is just the conspiracy theory that so many people have already—which I want to disassociate myself from. But, if we put aside those conspiracy theories, there are nonetheless reasons to be interested in how information about the brain is going to be used in the future.

For example, evidence suggests that certain chemicals are released by the brain when people are in trusting relationships with one another. So, think now about interrogating detainees in Guantanamo. What if it were feasible to introduce this chemical, this neurotransmitter, artificially, so that instead of waterboarding people or playing good cop/ bad cop, you could chemically induce trusting feelings on the part of the subject of an interrogation? Some people will obviously say that that is a good thing, particularly if innocent people are at risk and this individual might have some information. Other people will say, well, this is a slippery slope here.

What might happen if the same chemical is used against our security agents, for example?

Precisely, or even domestically. If it becomes a useful intervention, then will domestic authorities be given the opportunity to use the stuff? And how does this rub up against our constitutional rights? So, that’s just one example of why we need to be concerned.

[And yet] so many of [the technologies discovered by defense-funded neuroscience] are good for people, which makes them much harder to talk about than nuclear weapons technology or biological weapons.

For example, there’s evidence that beta blockers, which are used for people with heart disease, can be used to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder. There are some people who believe that not only are they useful after someone has been in a stressful situation, but it might even be plausible to give somebody a beta blocker before they go into a stressful situation, because the drug seems to inhibit the association of experiences with emotions and their consolidation into long-term memory.

Imagine if you were to give a beta blocker to a soldier before he or she went into a combat situation. On the one hand you might prevent or at least ameliorate the terrible emotional feelings that could come from what they see and do in combat, but, to put it in a single phrase, do we want an army of guilt-free soldiers?

So again the more we learn about the possibility of managing if not reading the brain, the more we’ll have to confront these questions. And because they are dual-use, they can be used in both military and civilian contexts, and they can be used both to heal and to harm they become all the more complicated.

All of the issues I talk about in Mind Wars about national security and the brain are part of a bigger conversation, which I think is maybe the most important thing we will talk about in the 21st century: How are we going to enter into changing what we are? What ought the limits be?

But in the end, you don’t advocate separating military from civilian science.

That’s right. Generally if you prohibit scientific research on what could ultimately be important national security technologies, you’re just going to force them underground. Especially in a society like ours, we need to maintain and enhance the relationships between our academic science institutions and the military, because if we tell our government that they can’t give grants to university scientists because we’re afraid that it will be bad for the university, we’re just going to force government to do it on its own, and secretly.

So I advocate continued and even increased funding for DARPA and finding ways to ensure that academia and the security establishment remain in contact with one another. I think it’s bad for democracy to do it any other way.

About the Author

Dr. Moreno is the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia; Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics; and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Washington, DC.

He is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and serves on the Institute’s Board on Health Sciences Policy. Moreno is also a member of the Council on Accreditation of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs, and a past president of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is a bioethics advisor for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Faculty Affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University, and a Fellow of the Hastings Center and the New York Academy of Medicine.

Also read: What Near-Death and Psychedelic Experiences Reveal about Human Consciousness