cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everybody, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center and for UW Extension, and on
behalf of our partners, Wisconsin Alumni Association and Wisconsin Public Television, thanks again for coming to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. I'm delighted to be able to
introduce three speakers tonight who are going to be telling us about the unusual if not unique new program in neuroscience and
public policy here at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I was Congressional Science Fellow 10 years ago, that's my
one little brush with public policy, and I think this is a pretty fascinating aspect to be able to have something at the
State Capitol on it and the U.S. Capitol on it and the implications for neuroscience and public policy are pretty
wide ranging. We have three speakers, David Weimer, Kim Farbota, and Ron Kalil.
David Weimer is a professor of public affairs and political science. He's done research in the areas
of energy, environmental, criminal justice, and health policy. His most recent book, titled
"Medical Governance," assesses the processes by which rules for the allocation of transplant organs are made.
He is a past president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management and a fellow of the National Academy
of Public Administration. Kim Farbota is a second year student in the neuroscience and public policy program.
She graduated from the University of Illinois in 2009 with degrees in political science and biological
psychology. She is supported by a fellowship from the NIH Institutes on Aging for her research examining the
long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury in human subjects. She intends to pursue a research
career while remaining active in science policy in a consulting capacity. And Professor Ron Kalil is a
professor here in neuroscience and is the director of neuroscience and public policy program and of the WM Keck
Laboratory for Biological Imaging. His research interests focus on exploring the feasibility of
using transplanted neural stem cells to repair the injured brain and on the generation of new nerve cells in the adult
brain. I've been intrigued personally by the series of neuroscience presenters we've had in the last
few months here at Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm particularly looking forward to these three tonight.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Kalil to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Ronald Kalil: So this is going to be probably on unusual presentation because you come here every Wednesday night to
hear directly about some science, and although we could add to the neuroscientists that you've heard from, what we're
really going to talk to you about is a program that was started about five years ago to try to prepare scientists who
are inclined to go out into society and help to shape policy to give them the skills that they need to do that.
Most scientists tend to work in their labs and focus on their research and rarely look across the street at what is happening
in the larger community of society. And for those who do want to look across the street and maybe
interact, they don't know how to talk the language, in general, they don't know how that other part of the world works, and so
they usually lie down until the thought goes away. And this is no good. This is no good for our society,
and it's really no good for our scientists. So the whole raison d'etre for this program was here we have
two essentially isolated worlds. We have the world of science and we have the world of society, and under normal circumstances
they remain isolated and they move forward in parallel. The aim of the program is as simple as can be.
It's to train people who will be skilled in science, in particular in neuroscience, and also skilled in the tools that
are necessary to shape public policy. And so they will earn two degrees in this program.
They will earn a PhD degree in neuroscience, and they will be qualified researchers to go out and make new discoveries about
how the brain works, and they will also have the opportunity to earn either a master's degree in public policy, which will
prepare them for making a contribution largely in domestic policy, or a master's degree in international public policy,
which will prepare them for working on international issues. And hopefully on May the 19th they will have the
opportunity to combine their PhD in neuroscience with a JD in law. So these are the three
cross-overs that the program sits on top of and permits students in an integrated program to move forward and earn
these combined degrees. So why is this important? Well, in April of 2009, Bruce Alberts, who was formally the
president of the National Academy of Sciences and is now the editor, the chief editor, of Science Magazine, the most
prominent and influential science journal in the United States, he wrote a seminal editorial titled Science for
Science, and it made one simple claim: that the way things are going, we can't continue and we have to do something to bring
scientists and society closer together. And when I read the article, I said well, at least there's one
other person who feels this way. And so I wrote to Bruce and I said Bruce, we have the same sort of notion that you do and
we've done something about it. We've created a graduate program to train people who will be able to bring science and society
closer together. And he was so excited he said send us a description of our program and we'll publish it in
Science, which we did and he did, and then I was able to persuade him this past spring, because he is now an US Science
Envoy and is spending most of his life on an airplane in different parts of the world, to come here, and he lectured in
the seminar which holds the program together. So there have been efforts, long-standing efforts, underway
in the country to try to do something about these two separate worlds. And for many years the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, indicated up there as AAAS, has had a fellowship policy program who people who
have PhDs in science to go to Washington and try to get a taste of how government works. And this is a step in the right
direction. Okay? But they've been trained as scientists and now they go to
Washington and they have tried to pick up on their own how it's going to work. The California Science and
Technology Fellowships are a remarkably progressive initiative. The fellowships are supported
by the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation. And what these fellowships do is they place scientists in the
California state legislature for a year so that they can have a year's experience seeing how legislation is made, maybe it's
like sausage, you don't want to know, and the legislators can have an opportunity to interact with scientists.
So this helps to break down the barriers of people coming from very different worlds talking to each other.
And the AAAS has had, for a long time, a formal program in scientific freedom, responsibility, and law, which
has made an effort to try to provide an opportunity for scientists who want to be interested in things outside of
their field to gain that knowledge. But none of these programs are training people explicitly in
the two worlds. They're providing opportunities and it's up to the people who have an interest to take
advantage of the opportunity and make of it what they can. Now one of the major areas that is now linking neuroscience to
society is the relationship between neuroscience and the law, which one can say is perhaps the most codified form
of public policy that exists in our society. And the amount of activity underway in the country on
neuroscience and the law is just phenomenal, and so here is a website describing a conference that was held in March of this
year on law and the brain. And here are some of the issues that were raised during that conference.
And I think Kim is going to talk about the first one to some extent. But these are all sorts of
issues that come out of neuroscience that influence the law. What about false memories?
How is the adolescent brain different from the adult? You may all be aware or you may not be aware that in this state,
10-year-olds who are involved in capital crimes are tried in the adult justice system. 10-year-olds do not have adult
brains and they are not responsible adults, and yet in Wisconsin, at present, they are swept into the adult justice
system. And the Supreme Court is said to be, this year, looking at that issue.
Now how can the Supreme Court gain the knowledge that it needs to try to make possibly a change in this law?
It has to hear from neuroscientists who will inform them what the 10-year-old brain is and how it differs from the
adult brain. This is perhaps the most massive undertaking in the country. And this is a project on law and
neuroscience which is underway at several universities around the country funded by a $10 million grant from
the MacArthur Foundation. This is the same MacArthur Foundation that gives out the Genius Awards that you've
probably heard about. And they thought that this issue of how neuroscience intersects with the law was so important
that they charted these groups of faculty at different universities around the country to study it.
And one of the first things that has emerged is a guide, a handbook, for judges. And these are the issues that
are taken up in the handbook that is given to judges to try to give them a short course on what's going on in neuroscience
and how it should influence their judgments. And the AAAS is now holding workshops on a quarterly basis
all around the country and inviting judges who work in these different sectors of the country to come to these
workshops and learn about neuroscience and how they should take what neuroscience is revealing about how the human
brain works into perspective when they decide how to deal with people who are brought before them in their courts.
And the person who runs these workshops was here recently and he said the judges are just competing with each other to get
a slot in the workshop because they've come to appreciate that they need to know something about the how the brain works as
modern science reveals it because our common law is predicated on a notion that goes back for hundreds of years and
that is that we are always at times rational actors perfectly aware of what we're doing, and therefore when we do something
bad, we should be punished. And neuroscience is saying no, this is not the case. There are times when you can
predict that somebody's not going to be a rational actor. There are times when people have imbalances in the chemicals that
help the brain to function, and at that time they're not responsible for their actions. So the whole issue is how can we
decide how to take the findings from neuroscience and help people who have to implement the law realize that things aren't
as straightforward as what was set down in England years ago upon which our common law is based.
And so that's the neuroscience and public policy program. It's not going to just provide an opportunity, it's going to
train people. It's going to train people who are comfortable in both domains. And so here are some of the
reasons for the program's existence. I think one of them I've emphasized.
It's just absolutely essential for scientists to be able to go out into society and for people in society to appreciate how
science and the policies that are based on it are affecting their lives. Okay?
And if you had to choose one science to maybe get something like this bridging program underway, neuroscience would be
the logical choice. Because throughout the entire life cycle of a human being from the time that they're still
developing in a mother's womb to the time that they die, neuroscience has something to say about it.
And there are policies at every stage and there are laws at every stage of the life cycle which neuroscience can help to
inform. And so, as I've mentioned now 25 times, it's the purpose of the neuroscience and public policy
program to help shape those policies and if the degree on May 19th is approved by the last of the five university
committees that it has been reviewed by, then we'll be training neuroscientists who can help shape the law.
So this is just a summary. In 2007, when we took our first class, we offered a PhD degree in neuroscience and, as I said,
a master's degree in public policy with an emphasis on public policy. Three years later, last year, we
got approval to offer a second master's option in international public affairs because many young people are very interested
in working outside the country on international issues. And, as I say, awaiting final approval, the outcome will be
known later this month, will be a degree, a dual degree, in neuroscience and a JD in law. And so we hope that we will
release into the world a brand new cohort of neuroscientists who are going to be multiple capabilities.
And there's no other program in the country that's trying to do this. There are a lot of people
watching us. I received a telephone call from a faculty member at Dartmouth this spring, and she wanted to
teach a course on neuroscience and public policy and basically wanted me to help her prepare her course.
I directed her to the program's website, and I said there are a lot of good links there, why don't you have a look at the
program's website. And so, yes, by all means, I should have announced that questions are the name of the
game tonight. So if you have questions at any time, I'm through, but when Dave or Kim talk, feel free
to interrupt or ask afterwards. Yes? >> Is there any other branch of science that's doing this kind
of...? >> Not at present. >> Why neuroscience? >> Well, I think if you're
thinking about how children develop, neuroscience has something to say about that. If you're thinking about how
people become adults and their brains don't become fully adult until their early 20s. This is something that 10 years
ago people said are you kidding me? I've got a teenage son. He's a complete adult.
He's a little wacky, but he's an adult. He's not an adult. The brain doesn't finish
developing until 20. Neuroscience says something about that. Neuroscience says that teens can
do rapid things, very much more rapidly than their elders, but they're completely incompetent when it comes to doing multiple
things at the same time. Which is why the state of Virginia banned teenagers using cell phones in cars because they
can't talk on the phone, well most adults can't, and drive at the same time. But teenagers are particularly
compromised by that. You move on in life and you start to fail. You start to be err to various
diseases of the brain. The most awesome one is Alzheimer's disease. Neuroscience has something to
say about that and what should be the policies that the country should put in place for people at all of these stages of the
life cycle. That's why I think neuroscience was a good place to start. Yes?
Australia has mental health courts, is the United States going to follow suit? >> Could you repeat it please?
Australia has mental health courts like our drug courts, but they're called mental health courts, is the United States
going to follow suit? >> I am not aware of that so therefore the best thing I can say is I don't know.
Yes? >> I agree that neuroscience and policy need to be linked together, but psychologists also
have a lot to say about human development. >> Exactly. I agree with you completely.
And maybe they'll pay attention and they'll start a psychology and public policy program because psychology is very
different from neuroscience. Neuroscience grew out of psychology back in the 1960s. It was pretty much codified as a
field in the 1960s. Wasn't recognized as a real field until probably the 1980s and now is the largest field, or
at least one of the largest fields, in all of biology. Every year there is a annual meeting and at the last annual
meeting in November of last year 35,000 people from around the world came to the neuroscience meeting.
Some of them working on proteins, some of them working on the most complex of human behaviors.
Okay, if there are no further questions, then my good friend and colleague David Weimer will come, and he will give a
perspective from somebody in policy. >> Dave Weimer: Thanks, Ron. Can you hear me?
I should say that the neuroscience of public policy program exists because of Ron's efforts.
And over the last few years I've watched him make those efforts, making something out of a situation with very limited
resources. So he's really the father of the program and along the way he's been the mother to it as well to
keep it healthy. I want to say a little bit about public policy training at the University of Wisconsin.
The La Follette School trains people to participate in public decision, either as government employees, people in nonprofit
organizations, sometimes in the private sector. We train people both in public management and in policy
analysis. And the policy analysis involves preparing them to understand situations, frame them as
problems we can do something about, develop alternative ways of dealing with those problems, systematically assessing those
problems in terms of goals and values and constraints. It's very clear that those activities demand an ability to
interpret what's going on in the scientific world. And I think that's a basic weakness within most of the
public policy training programs. Occasionally we're lucky and get students who had been science majors as undergraduates.
Wonderful students to have but we really want to have people who thoroughly understand the scientific endeavor.
And probably the only way you can understand it is to be a scientist to be at the bench. However, if you spend your time
at the bench, you may not be exposed to some of the workings of the world that are helpful in understanding how public policy
is made. Now, you can think of neuroscience and public policy being connected in three ways.
One way is public policy impinges neuroscience research. So funding decisions for supporting research, human
subjects rules, rules about the care of animals, those are all set by public policy but have an impact on neuroscientists.
Then there are neuroscience issues that force reconsideration of public policies.
And I think what Kim is going to be talking about gets close to that. So for example, now that we can
do various sorts of mapping of the brain, should they be used by the public and private sector in various ways?
And then finally there are the many issues that Ron already mentioned and that I'd like to elaborate on a little bit.
So Ron sort of stole my thunder and talked about it in terms of stages of life, and I'd just like to elaborate on it a little
bit. So if we think of early childhood, and I guess maybe under the title developing
brain, there are a lot of public policy issues that can be informed by the research. So right now we recognize that
nutrition makes a difference early in life. And we have some programs. We have a program for women,
infants, and children that provides aid to low income people. We also have a growing
realization that early childhood education may make a difference. Now, we can't afford to do everything.
We'd like to have some knowledge about which investments are going to be most productive. And that's something that
neuroscience can do. So as Ron mentioned, we can move on to adolescents and maybe this is the maturing brain.
And here we have obvious implications, as Ron mentioned, for juvenile delinquency, for treating people in the criminal
justice system. Ron mentioned that 10-year-olds can be treated as adult felons and punished as adult felons.
More generally in Wisconsin we treat people who are 17 years of age as adults, and if they convicted, they go into the
adult system. Is this a good use of resources? We get into the adult phase, and I would label this may be the
patterned brain. And here we have issues that come up like addiction, various sorts of what we might label
unacceptable preferences. Thinking of addiction, despite years of efforts to discourage smoking, 20-some percent of
adults still spoke cigarettes. The Food and Drug Administration now has authority to regulate cigarettes.
How should they view substitutes for cigarettes? Smokeless tobacco? On the one hand, smokeless
tobacco products are much less risky. On the other hand, are they going to increase relapses into
smoking? Are they going to be more likely to stimulate experimentation with nicotine among children?
Those are the sorts of issues that come up. With respect to what I call unacceptable preferences, how do
we think about the punishment and treatment of pedophiles? Can they be changed? Can they live in the community
and resist their temptations? Those are clearly issues that we would want neuroscience to inform public policy.
Finally, we get to older adults, I'm now in this category, maybe the declining brain. As Ron mentioned, we have
concerns about various sorts of dementia. Among people who are 65, the prevalence of Alzheimer's
disease is about 1%. By the time we're 85, the prevalence is up to about 50%. When people become demented with
Alzheimer's or with other dementias, they rely on family to take care of them. Family resources, both financial
and emotional, get exhausted, so ultimately most people who have Alzheimer's end up in nursing homes.
Because nursing homes exhaust people's finances, ultimately the state pays for that nursing home through Medicaid.
And this problem is going to become much more dramatic as our generation, I'm on the edge of the baby boom, as we turn 65 or
get older. Here, again, a better understanding of the neuroscience will be valuable.
Particularly in helping us decide when it's possible to detect Alzheimer's early before symptoms appear.
Maybe we will have better drugs. We have drugs that slow it now. Maybe have better programs for helping people themselves
prepare and their families prepare. Well, these are all sorts of issues in public policy that are
important that should be informed by neuroscience. People in the public policy field right now generally have
to rely on people to do that translation. The sorts of people that the neuroscience and public policy
program is training will be very skilled interpreters in helping to make sure that the best in neuroscience gets into the
policy process. So for all these reasons, myself and my colleagues in the La Follette School are very
grateful to Ron for creating this program, and we very much enjoy working with him on trying to make it a success.
So thank you. [APPLAUSE] Should I hold off questions, let Kim go and hold off?
Kim Farbota: All right, so my name is Kim Farbota. As Ron said, I am a second-year student in the neuroscience
and public policy program, and I study, I use human neuro-imaging techniques to study traumatic brain injury.
But as Ron has been talking about and as Dave has been talking about, we're focusing on the intersection of neuroscience
and public policy today. And I am just trying to add some concreteness to that concept by introducing you an instance of
the intersection of these two fields that is emerging in our court rooms today. And in particular, we're going
to be talking about how some people are attempting to use neuroscientific techniques as perhaps a better method of lie
detection. So the two primary questions I'm going to be addressing is, first, are we able to use
neuroscience to determine if a person is telling the truth? How accurately are we able to do so?
And then secondarily, I want it ask you all to think about whether or not it's ethical to do this?
What are the implications of looking past what someone says and instead looking into the mental processes underlying
that? What kind of privacy violations are we committing in our quest to uphold justice?
So first I'm going to give you some background on the fMRI technique. fMRI stands for functional
magnetic resonance imaging. And it's a technique that uses the same machine, MRI machine as you have in any hospital.
A person lies out on that bench you see right there and their head is moved into the opening of that machine.
And in the fMRI technique, the machine detects blood flow changes to different regions of the brain as the person either
is at rest or is doing some simple task like looking at pictures or reading words. And the assumption behind this
is that the areas of the brain that you're using to complete a particular task, they need more oxygen and they need more
glucose than other regions of your brain that are at rest, and because of that your body sends more blood to those regions.
So as an example of that, the amygdala is a structure that processes fear. So if we put somebody into the
MRI machine and we start running this fMRI process and then we show them pictures of faces that are afraid or angry, that
triggers a natural, however subtle it may be, fear response in most people. And we're able to observe an
increase in blood flow to the amygdala region. And that's the picture we're showing here.
That's just a slice of the brain if you were to cut the head just like this and look at it head on, you'd see the increases of
blood flow right there. And I just want to remind everyone that this is an average response.
So some people may have more or less activation or increased blood flow in that region. Some people may have it not
there at all but if he were to take an average. If you had a hundred people do this, on average you'd get
something that looked about like that. So that's the technique. And the basic premise behind the
technique is that you have certain brain regions that are responsible for some mental processes and a different set of
brain regions responsible for another. And some individuals are of the belief that perhaps the
processes behind lying are different than the processes behind truth telling. So you can extrapolate from that
perhaps if we were to image the brain while someone was telling a lie, it might look different than it looks when someone is
telling the truth. And there are certain companies out there right now that are attempting to market this
technology to individuals, lawyers, corporate entities, government bodies, etc, making the claim that they are able to,
think they claim right now with 90% accuracy determine whether or not a person is telling the truth.
And they claim that in the near future they will have 99% accuracy. And also, I want to direct your
attention to this picture up here in the middle where it's indicating that those red regions are supposed to be more
active during lie telling than truth telling. Whereas, the blue regions are supposed to be more active when
someone's telling truth. So they focus on the prefrontal cortical regions. If you see in the top two brains
there, those regions that are in red are essentially right here in the prefrontal cortex which is a region associated with
executive control. And the assumption is that when somebody is telling a lie, they have to use executive control to
subconsciously suppress the urge to tell the truth. And on this website they claim that right now the only major
problem with this technique is that a person might move around in the scanner and your results won't be quite right.
However, myself, as well as a lot of the rest of the scientific community, believe that there are a lot more
problems with this technique that should be considered before we could possibly consider it for admissible evidence in a
court of law. First of all, as I noted earlier, every person's brain is different.
The averages we see are based on a small sample of people and there are exactly that. They are averages.
You can't know for sure that just because a person's prefrontal cortex is activated when they say something that
that person is lying. There are a great number of reasons why it could be active. Second of all, there's a problem
just in construct. It's very possible that a person may not know they are not telling the truth.
Eyewitness testimonies are notoriously inaccurate because memory is not a recording, memory is a reconstruction.
So if you ask somebody to look back on an event that happened several months or even years ago and recall a small detail that
they didn't know was significant at the time, since they've been asked to think about it then they may have said okay, I think
this is what happened, I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and over time come to believe okay, that's what
happened. So if someone believes what they are telling is true, it's going to look exactly the same in
terms of their brain activity as if what they're saying is actually true. Another major problem with this
technique is that there have been a lot of studies done recently looking at "psychopaths" who we can assume
are a lot more likely than the rest of us to commit crimes, particularly violent crimes. But these people also tend to
have a characteristic where they don't feel conflicted about lying. And their brains look very
different during a lie than a normal person's brain would look. So in essence what that means is
those who are most likely to lie are least likely to look like they are lying in terms of this technique.
And that's actually the same problem that the polygraph runs into. And then finally a problem when
these images is there's no adherent significance to them. They require interpretation. It doesn't just come up with a
plus or a minus. An expert has to look at it and say okay, this group of regions is activated which probably
means A,B, and C. So because of that, there's always room for bias and human error.
So now that we kind of have some ideas about the possibilities of this technique, I don't think that this technique is very
accurate right now, but I do want to say that there is a lot of potential in the future for it to become more accurate and
for a lot of the problems I described to be overcome with new science and better constructs.
But, even presuming that we could possibly become very accurate in this technology, there's a few questions we might
want to consider on the side of ethics. First of all, if we could do this, could and should we
require people to comply with this type of technique like we do sometimes with DNA samples in a court of law?
Is observing mental processes in some way essentially different than taking DNA? What kind of privacy violations
are we committing? And that's about all I have to say in my little introduction to this topic.
So I'm going to go ahead and open the floor up to questions, comments for Dave, Ron, or myself about this or anything
else said. Yes? >> About the latter issue of ethics, you could always have
informed consent. >> You could. Yes. She's mentioned informed consent
as a potential solution to the ethical problems which is a very important thing. Yes?
It seems that an additional confounding variable would be that if people are afraid that you're reading their mind, that
that could activate all kinds of other areas and just completely blow it. >> Absolutely.
Yes, the fear factor is definitely important, another issue. Yes?
Why did you choose to go into this program? >> The neuroscience and policy program?
To be perfectly honest, I just had an interest in both fields. I wasn't sure at the time how I was going to combine them.
I was very lucky to run into the only program in the country that did it close to home. But as I've moved forward I've
seen a lot of the relevance of the two, and I have a lot of hope for being able to combine them in my career.
Which is? Your career? >> Right now I'm feeling like I want to stay a scientist and be
doing the policy in a consulting capacity. I really enjoy doing neuroscience but I'd really like
to help other scientists contextualize it, and I think it's important that people who are involved in neuroscience
have an idea about policy. Particularly because policy basically controls the future of our science via various funding
mechanisms. Yes? >> Could you say something about how your work with traumatic
brain injury connects with the public policy piece on the court system? >> I don't know about the court
system. In terms of public policy, traumatic brain injury is becoming increasingly common,
and in addition to the initial effects, it leads to a lot of long-term health effects. So people who have a brain
injury early in life are almost twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's later in life. Because of that, having more
information about traumatic brain injury is important for the structure of Medicare, etc, preventative measures, and also
because traumatic brain injury is very relevant to war veterans. A lot of people get blast
injuries in the field so creating policies that establish a quick reaction to those injuries could be really
beneficial to a lot of people. But to be honest I didn't pick it because of an overlap with policy.
I picked something that I thought would be good science and I figured I should also learn about policy.
So the connection maybe tenuous. >> I guess I was wondering in relation to some of the same issues that would come up with
an adolescent in terms of the juvenile justice system and the immaturity of the brain and their behavior and in traumatic
brain injury the deficits that result from the injury and their behavior. >> I think that traumatic brain
injury could definitely be used in a court of law, possibly in conjunction with neuro-imaging evidence to substantiate a claim
that a person was not of their right mind or of full capacity at the time when a crime was committed.
I agree with that. There have actually been cases recently where that type of structural brain imaging, either
with a tumor or with an actual lesion as would result from an injury, has been used effectively in the court to try
and mitigate blame or responsibility for an action. >> Do you know if the science has advanced far enough to make
it really germane to, let's say, a legal case or...? >> I think that the science has advanced far enough to the
point that we've had to sort of recontextualize how we think about a crime, at least from the neuroscientific side because, as
a neuroscientist, I believe that pretty much every behavior can be at least partial biologically explained.
So if we're able to say this person committed this crime because they have this defect, and therefore we shouldn't
punish them or we should punish them to a lesser extent, you're going to run into problems because by that logic anyone
who's committed a crime has some form of a neurological deficit that's caused them to act in that manner.
So one thing that we've come to over and over again in our neuro and public policy seminars is that we're going to have to
switch our mentality from thinking about can we blame this person for their actions to simply can we rehabilitate this
person and are they likely to do it again. So I think the science has advanced far enough to make
claims about that to the point that it has caused some serious change in the way we think about the justice system.
Yes? >> That's a very interesting and I think probably uphill path to take given the current climate
on Capitol Hill. Are there people identified that either you or David or Ron know of in Congress who are trying to
establish themselves as leaders either in committees or in their personal offices as people who are going to take the lead or
how neuroscience interacts with public policies, with legislation, with those kinds of things?
We saw that happen in the late '70s with senators who became leaders in biotechnology. We've seen it with people who
became leaders in Nanotech. Who's stepping out front in Congress now? >> Ron's shaking his head no.
There have been iconic Congress people who have come and they have advanced the cause of science in America, and Jacob
Javits is one who comes to mind. There were people who took the welfare of science in the country as one of their major
priorities and worked relentlessly to advance it. I'm unaware of anybody now, especially, this wasn't so much
science as healthcare, when Ted Kennedy died, I'm not aware of anybody who's doing this. The Society for Neuroscience
sends legions of people into the offices of Congress people around the calendar trying to inform them about what's going
on in neuroscience and how they should be thinking about it when they're trying to develop policy.
But no one seems to emerge as this generation's or this year's or decade's science champion. >> There's almost an
anti-science attitude. >> We have a lot of attitudes which are difficult in our congress, yes.
[LAUGHTER] >> I would just add that one of the silver linings in times of fiscal stress for
states is it forces people to rethink criminal justice policy because there are many things we do that don't reduce crime and
are costly. And at least if we could start weeding some of those out, I think we could make a lot of
progress. [INAUDIBLE] >> Wisconsin spends twice as much annually on prisons than
Minnesota does, without any obvious improvement in the number of crimes that are committed.
So we're ahead of Minnesota at something? [LAUGHTER] >> Absolutely.
We're flushing more money down the drain in terms of incarceration with no obvious return for it, and many of the
people that were incarcerated could probably be, as Kim pointed out, rehabilitated. We have a mind set that goes
back for many years in Wisconsin: build, baby, build. >> Yes? >> Yes, the international policy
aspect of this, I'm having a hard time thinking what topics would they deal with? >> Okay, what about countries
which are routinely developing, not developing but depositing toxins in their land without knowledge whatsoever about what
the interactions between those toxins and the developing of the mature nervous system. It's a big problem in
an advanced country. Can you imagine what it's like in an undeveloped country? There are huge issues in terms
of how children in developing countries are treated and what resources that country will put in the early years to ensure
that those children have a chance to later mature and become productive citizens. So just about anything that you
can think of where neuroscience could inform policy, domestically, the need is large in developing countries.
And even for the United States in how we structure our food aid to people overseas. It's important that children
receive certain nutrients for their brains to develop, and that has not been the driving force behind policy, using
agricultural surpluses have been. So there are a lot of issues like that that are international
but relevant to us. >> Yes? >> Are you using neuroscience to study how decision makers make
decisions in public policy decision makers actually and what parts of the brain? [LAUGHTER]
Not me personally. >> They did a recent imaging study that demonstrated that there are profound differences
in brain activity between conservatives. So maybe at some point in the future we will understand why
one group of people can hold dear a set of values which are diametrically opposed to the values that another group of
people hold dear and what is going on differentially in the brains of each group of people. >> Is anybody working to
replicate that study? There's only one study on that particular issue, isn't there? >> Yeah, there is only one
study. And I'm not aware of whether anybody is replicating it. We had a recent talk by a
relatively new assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry whose work has achieved enormous attention
because he demonstrated that people with traumatic brain injury can behave like psychopaths.
That goes to your question. And so he gave a talk demonstrating what was going on in the brains of psychopaths and
what the behavioral characteristics were, and I politely asked him if he was next going to image the brains
of some people in our society who haven't been diagnosed as psychopaths but have exactly the same behavioral characteristics.
And he just sort of chuckled and said well, maybe I'll get to it. >> Is there going to be a special earmark in Congress to
fund that kind of research? [LAUGHTER] >> Other questions? If not, thank you all very much.
[APPLAUSE]