From The New York Times:
TOM WOLFE was so taken with Michael S. Gazzaniga’s ”Social Brain” that not only did he send Gazzaniga a note calling it the best book on the brain ever written, he had Charlotte Simmons’s Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience professor recommend it in class. In ”The Ethical Brain,” Gazzaniga tries to make the leap from neuroscience to neuroethics and address moral predicaments raised by developments in brain science. The result is stimulating, very readable and at its most edifying when it sticks to science.
Take the issue of raising intelligence by manipulating genes in test-tube embryos. Gazzaniga asks three questions. Is it technically possible to pick out ”intelligence genes”? If so, do those genes alone determine intelligence? And finally, is this kind of manipulation ethical? ”Most people jump to debate the final question,” he rightly laments, ”without considering the implications of the answers to the first two.” Gazzaniga’s view is that someday it will be possible to tweak personality and intelligence through genetic manipulation. But because personhood is so significantly affected by factors like peer influence and chance, which scientists can’t control, we won’t be able to make ”designer babies,” nor, he believes, will we want to.
More here.