Will Neuroscience Destroy Our Conception of Free Will?

Wired magazine very briefly discusses the implications of recent advances in neuroscience for the issue of insanity pleas. Previous legal attempts to blame our genes for bad behavior have failed to persuade juries, but the new challenges from neuroscience may well succeed where those earlier attempts fell short. Will we see a role for philosophers as expert witnesses attempting to explain compatibilist approaches to free will?

Wired News: Clone Ban Unlikely to Pass Senate

The change in administration makes stem cell proponents very nervous. Will a more republican Senate mean that the therapeutic cloning ban will finally pass, effectvely killing any chance for a stem cell biotech industry i nthe United States? Not according to Wired magazine, who report that, even with the change in administraion, a cloning ban is unlikely to pass even our new, more republican Senate. If Wired is right, the hopes for stem cell research in the US remain alive, and have been given a big boost by the passing of the $3 billion California stem cell initiative.

Nanotech Redux: Geneballs and Drive Through Genetic Testing

Wired has a great piece this month on the role of tiny particles of silica, which provide a kind of barcode readout of thousands of genetic tests at once. The technology is not yet ready for clinical testing, but revolutionary for computational clinical genomics. It will be interesting to see which if any of the new ELSI core grant centers would be looking at that. Anybody know (please comment)?