blog.bioethics.net

AJOB in The New Yorker

Margaret Talbot's piece in The New Yorker about the pursuit of effective lie detection contains a bunch of interesting facts and stories -- the creator of Wonder Woman and her lasso of truth was also one of the creators of the polygraph, the scientist who cracks a joke about criminals getting metal implants so they can't be scanned in an MRI machine. It also includes a mention of AJOB and a number of regular contributors to the journal:

Judy Illes and Eric Racine, bioethicists at Stanford, write that fMRI, by laying bare the brain's secrets, may "fundamentally alter the dynamics between personal identity, responsibility, and free will." A recent article in The American Journal of Bioethics asserts that brain-scan lie detection may "force a re-examination of the very idea of privacy, which up until now could not reliably penetrate the individual's cranium."

Legal scholars, for their part, have started debating the constitutionality of using brain-imaging evidence in court. At a recent meeting of a National Academy of Sciences committee on lie detection, in Washington, D.C., Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor, said, "When we make speculative leaps like these . . . it increases, sometimes in detrimental ways, the belief that the technology works." In the rush of companies like No Lie to market brain scanning, and in the rush of scholars to judge the propriety of using the technology, relatively few people have asked whether fMRIs can actually do what they either hope or fear they can do.

The AJOB article cited by Talbot is from March/April 2005.

Thanks to Tod Chambers for spotting the article and passing it along.

-Greg Dahlmann