If you had the nerve-degenerating disease multiple sclerosis, would you want to know, even if the symptoms weren’t going to appear for years? The research raises medical and ethical questions that genetic researchers and patients have bandied about for years: If someone’s at risk for a disease, should they be told?
The government is assessing the impact of a new generation of drugs that are claimed to make people more intelligent. If, in the future, there are cognition tablets for exams and I wasn’t happy for my children to take them, would I be disadvantaging them against those children that actually take them?
Teenage anorexics will win greater rights to refuse treatment for their eating disorders under controversial new mental health laws to be debated by MPs this week. Parents have until now been able to override automatically a child’s wish not to be hospitalised for starving themselves, ensuring that they get treatment even if they do not want it.
A CONTROVERSIAL treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, despite potential to cause suicidal thoughts and stunt growth. The move comes after a Therapeutic Goods Administration assessment of Strattera last year, which identified suicidal thoughts, agitation, weight loss, chest pain and swollen testicles as potential side effects of the drug.
Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others` lives.
Scientists studying stroke patients are reporting that an injury to a specific part of the brain, near the ear, can instantly and permanently break a smoking habit, effectively erasing the most stubborn of addictions. The new finding, which is to appear in the journal Science on Friday, is likely to alter the course of addiction research, pointing researchers toward new ideas for treatment, experts say.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place.
If there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it? As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, it`s an idea that may not be so far off, and that has some critics alarmed, and some trauma victims filled with hope.
Should technology be used to stimulate and improve the brain – improving grades for instance?
But Professor Miguel Nicolelis, a neurobiologist from Duke University, was critical of the research. He said: „When you decide, like this company did, to go into clinical trials for an invasive technique the stakes are very high.“
