title: The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects
author: Dai Rees
description: What are the legal, ethical and moral implications of research in "the new brain sciences"? Rees and Rose, two distinguished British academics, invited the contributors to this collection of essays to ask hard questions about these subjects. Their answers will make you stop and think. You might hope, for example, that decades of progress in psychiatry and psychology would be helping courts assess guilt, innocence and appropriate punishments. But contributor Stephen Sedley, a British judge who spent six years presiding over homicide cases, finds experts to be of little value. He admires the jury system because "of the rapidity with which twelve lay people were generally able to grasp and apply to a live problem before them principles of law." As for the testimony of psychiatrists, however, he says that he and the jury are typically left "peering into a very deep pool indeed with very little help about what was to be found there." Perhaps the most visible of the new brain sciences is psychopharmacology, which has brought us drugs now taken by millions of people every day. John Cornwell, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, writes from a courtroom in Louisville, Ky., describing a jury faced with "Prozac on trial."
zlib_text: NEUROSCIENCE
  SCIENCE OF THE BRAIN
  AN INTRODUCTION FOR YOUNG STUDENTS
  British Neuroscience Association
  European Dana Alliance for the Brain
  
  This booklet was prepared and edited on behalf of the British Neuroscience Association and the European Dana Alliance for
  the Brain by Richard Morris (University of Edinburgh) and Marianne Fillenz (University of Oxford).  The graphic design was by
  Jane Grainger (Grainger Dunsmore Design Studio, Edinburgh).  We are grateful for contributions from our colleagues in the
  Division of Neuroscience, particularly Victoria Gill, and others in the neuroscience community in Edinburgh. We also thank
  members of the University Department of Physiology in Oxford, particularly Colin Blakemore, and helpful colleagues in other
  institutions. Their names are listed on the back page.
  The British Neuroscience Association (BNA) is the professional body in the United Kingdom that represents 
  neuroscientists and is dedicated towards a better understanding of the nervous sy