What’s your experience?

In June, Bill Destler, president of the Rochester Institute of Technology discussed his school’s plan to foster innovation through academic-industrial partnerships.

In July Lan Xue director of the China Institute for Science and Technology Policy argues that pushes to globalize science must not threaten local innovations in developing countries.

What do you think?

This week in a Commentary in Nature, Tadataka Yamada, Alice Dautry and Mark Walport urge the vaccine research and development community not to become complacent about this important issue. Although their respective institutions — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Pasteur Institute and the Wellcome Trust — are working with other parties to develop new resources and collaborative opportunities to provide vaccines where they may be needed most (the developing world), the authors say a wider community response is also needed.

In a related Commentary, Steven Salzberg calls for greater transparency in the viral-strain selection process for the human influenza vaccine. The vaccine for the 2007–2008 season failed for predictable and, says Salzberg, avoidable reasons. If the process remains closed, and researchers are denied access to sequencing data used in the selection process, future vaccine failures could be more dramatic and deadly.

What do you think? Can a pre-pandemic vaccine curb a major catastrophe? And are the cooperative attitudes that Yamada, Dautry and Walport advocate exactly the kinds of things that are lacking from efforts to develop seasonal flu vaccines?

The authors promote a zero tolerance policy among institutions and make other recommendations. An editorial this week makes a broader call for change, recognizing that not all incidents require full on investigations with punitive action, it calls instead for enhanced structures to use instances of mistake and misconduct as learning experiences that might inform better policies.

How could better policies push back against this seeming flood of misconduct?

Should we look to the lessons of ivy-league bound students in South Korea as a recent New York Times story seems to imply?

Can we better learn from high performers within the bounds of this country, or is the Nation’s educational system as obsolete as Windows 95?

The time for discussion is ripe as the National Academies convened this week to refocus congressional attention on their clarion call for change, Rising above the Gathering Storm

Lowell and Salzman who responded in the past to the Gathering Storm report have said they may be able to respond to questions and comments.

In January, Nature launched an informal online survey into readers’ use of cognition-enhancing drugs. We received 1400 responses. Major highlights from those results were published in a 10 April news story. But because we couldn’t highlight all the data in our news coverage, we now give you a chance to take a look at all the results, and share your analysis. Click here to download the results for yourself (Note: you will be redirected to a third-party file sharing website that is not part of Nature Publishing Group). Here you’ll find a Summary document in adobe pdf; two Microsoft Excel files (Sheet 1 and Sheet 2) with full answers to all questions; and finally a single document (Sheet 3) with all the answers represented in numerical format for easier analysis.

Download them, take a look and use the commenting function below to tell us if you find anything interesting.

• Much of our coverage of cognitive enhancement started with an editorial that ran last November.
• Taking a cue from the interest it generated, we published a commentary by Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir that asked readers if they would take these kinds of drugs if minimal risks were involved.
• The commentary sparked much discussion in an online forum we created and among various news outlets and blogs.
  We published two pages worth of letters we received.

Do you know of international misconduct-related documents that could inform the templates the OECD hopes to produce? Have you encountered relevant situations or challenges while conducting research with scientists from other countries? How were these situations resolved? Have your say on policing international misconduct here:

What I think is most interesting about Sahakian and Morein-Zamir’s excellent Commentary is what it doesn’t say! Let me explain what I mean.

The authors lay out the risks and benefits of enhancing the cognition of normal, healthy individuals with a clear, matter-of-fact style. They duly note the uncertainties associated with the effects of long-term use, and although I agree with Rose and others that more could be said about the ways these drugs interact with social expectations and power differentials, Sahakian and Morein-Zamir do not neglect broader societal issues and discuss them in the same framework of risks and benefits. They challenge us to look at the facts of the matter and formulate our policies, personal and societal, based on it. This rational approach is all too rare.

Too much of the previous discussion of neurocognitive enhancement has been focused on effort and dessert, and related issues like the value of hard work, the need to “earn” one’s success and self-esteem, and respect for our natural or God-given limitations (e.g., Fukuyama, 2002; Kass, 2003). Behind these moral concerns appears to lurk a gut reaction that most of us experience at least fleetingly when considering brain enhancement, a reaction that Kass has encouraged us to heed by referring to “the wisdom of repugnance.” Perfectly healthy individuals drugging themselves (or worse, their healthy children) for the sake of satisfying oversized ambitions certainly has its “repugnant” side. But is it “wise” to make decisions on the basis of a gut reaction? Or should we attempt a more rational analysis of the different contexts, methods and motives for neurocognitive enhancement and their likely outcomes?

Sahakian and Morein-Zamir’s approach is cautious but open-minded, providing a rational assessment of neurocognitive enhancement’s risks and benefits without any obeisance to the wisdom of repugnance. They have done us a service in framing the issues in this way.

Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our Posthuman Future. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Kass, L. (2003). Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of
Happiness.
Harper Collins.

Two scientists writing a commentary article in the December 20 issue of Nature want to stimulate your brains – in more ways than one.

Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge University argue that the increased usage of brain-boosting drugs by ill and healthy individuals raises ethical questions that cannot be ignored. An informal questionnaire Sahakian and Morein-Zamir sent to some of their scientific colleagues in the US and UK revealed fairly casual use by academics, and we now want to hear your views on the topic..

The authors arguments can be read in more detail here. An earlier Nature editorial also discussed some of the ethical issues surrounding drug-based enhancement in healthy individuals inspired by a longer discussion paper from the British Medical Association.

To trigger broader discussion of these issues Sahakian and Morein-Zamir propose the following questions:

> Should adults with severe memory and concentration problems be given cognitive enhancing drugs?

> If such drugs have only mild side effects, should they be prescribed more widely for other psychiatric disorders?

> Do the same arguments apply for young children and adolescents with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as those suffering from ADHD?

> Would you boost your own brain power?

> How would you react if you knew your colleagues – or your students – were taking cognitive enhancers?

> How should society react?

Please contribute to this online discussion. We especially want to hear from you if you’re already using these drugs – or if you know people who are. What are your reasons for taking, or not taking, these drugs?

For the next two weeks the authors of the Nature commentary will be joining in the conversation here. Barbara Sahakian also discusses cognitive enchancers on Nature’s podcast, extract posted here

Get ready to expand your mind..