Brain Imaging

Abstract

Advances in neuroscience are increasingly intersecting with issues of ethical, legal, and social interest. This study is an analysis of press coverage of an advanced technology for brain imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging, that has gained significant public visibility over the past ten years. Discussion of issues of scientific validity and interpretation dominated over ethical content in both the popular and specialized press. Coverage of research on higher order cognitive phenomena specifically attributed broad personal and societal meaning to neuroimages. The authors conclude that neuroscience provides an ideal model for exploring science communication and ethics in a multicultural context. Keywordsneuroethics; functional magnetic resonance imaging; press; neuroscience; content analysis; bioethics Advances in neuroscience are intersecting with ethical, legal, and social issues. Some issues concern clinical applications such as the early diagnosis of disease, while others relate to the growing number of studies using frontier neurotechnologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of social behaviors. Here, we present a study on how fMRI, one model of neurotechnology that has diffused rapidly in the research environment and gained substantial visibility, has been covered in the print media. Drawing on lessons learned from press coverage of other scientific domains, we examined the complexity of communication of brain findings and the need for their consideration in a multicultural context.In the past, press coverage of genetics and genomics has brought ethical, social, and legal issues to the forefront. Scholars of bioethics, social sciences, and law, for example, have investigated informed consent, risks of "geneti-cization," and breaches of confidentiality extensively. Vast interdisciplinary programs in numerous countries have addressed these issues and others. Scholars of science communication and other social scientists have played an important role in disseminating the information resulting from this research. For more than two decades, they

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