Trying to Be Less Stupid: The Hard Work of Brain Science

Trying to Be Less Stupid: The Hard Work of Brain Science: You have also written about the nature of consciousness as it affects the abortion debate. Talk about that.





I served on the President's Bioethics Council and a key question that comes up is whether a fertilized egg, a blastocyst, is a human. What we cherish, as human beings, are the memories and the things we can do that are managed by the brain. But there's no brain in the blastocyst. If you take a high-powered microscope and look at the blastocyst, you won't find a brain cell there. So, to give that a moral status as a functioning human being seems crazy.





Being human is the accumulation of life's experience and the management of your life. That's what's human. The issue we were approaching on the council was: Can a 14-day-old blastocyst be used for biomedical research? Is that an affront to the human condition? Ten out of seventeen experts did not have a moral problem with that. Interestingly, you couldn't predict how people would come out based on their beliefs. There were Catholics who said, "The blastocyst is fine." There were secular Jews who said, "No, that's not fine."