Monday, November 26, 2007

Bioethicist Jonathan Moreno Discusses Mind Wars at UT Dallas Dec. 11

By Pegasus News wire

RICHARDSON — Jonathan Moreno will discuss Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense at The University of Texas at Dallas at 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 11 in Conference Center room 1.102.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is organized by UT Dallas’ Center for Values in Medicine, Science and Technology. Moreno’s lecture is the second of this year’s public forums on values in medicine, science and technology. Each public forum lecture is followed by ample opportunity for discussion from the audience.

Photo provided by UT Dallas

Jonathan Moreno

In his latest book, “Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense,” bioethicist Jonathan Moreno describes the range of brain-related research paid for by U.S. military agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Moreno raises questions about the use of neuroscience technologies to enable soldiers to delay sleep, increase attention or ward off the trauma of war.

From drugs that could improve soldiers’ abilities and endurance or that could bewilder enemy combatants to devices controlled by or able to control a person’s mind, the potential uses of advances in neuroscience will change how wars are fought. Moreno argues that it is “time for neurobiologists -- and the rest of us -- to get a grip on the ethical and social issues of waging ‘mind wars’ and decide how far we want this battle-science to go.”

Moreno is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies. He serves on the Institute's Health Sciences Policy Board and its committee on prison research. Moreno is a member of the Council on Accreditation of the Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs and a former 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. Moreno is the Emily Davie and Joseph S. Kornfeld Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia, the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He has been invited to testify before both houses of Congress.

Moreno is a frequent guest on news and information programs, including NPR's All Things Considered and Science Friday, ABC World News Tonight, The CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC News and The McLaughlin Group and an ethics commentator for ABCNews.com. He is often quoted in national publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe and The Baltimore Sun.

Source: UT Dallas

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