Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nikolas Rose is professor of sociology and head of the Department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine at King's College London. His books include The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton). Joelle M. Abi-Rached is a PhD candidate in the history of science at Harvard University.

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"The 'neurofication' of the humanities, social sciences, public policy, and the law has attracted promoters and detractors. What we have lacked until now is a critical but open-minded look at 'neuro.' This is what Rose and Abi-Rached have given us in this thoughtful and well-researched book. They do not jump on the neuro bandwagon, but instead offer a clear accounting of its appeal, its precedents in psychology and genetics, its genuine importance, and ultimately its limitations. A fascinating and important book."--Martha J. Farah, University of Pennsylvania

"Neuro makes a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the impact of the brain sciences on social and cultural processes. The scholarship throughout is brilliant. This book gives us extremely perceptive, detailed, and illuminating analyses of what is actually being claimed in the various branches of the neurosciences. It will attract a great deal of interest and controversy."--Emily Martin, author of Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture

"I enjoyed reading this book. It provides an interesting and comprehensive map of the many sciences and quasi-sciences that have embraced the 'neuro' prefix. I also appreciate how Rose and Abi-Rached manage to examine the explosion of 'neuros' with a critical eye, but without dismissing the genuine prospects that it may hold."--Michael E. Lynch, Cornell University

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Neuro

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................ixAbbreviations.....................................................xiIntroduction......................................................1One The Neuromolecular Brain......................................25Two The Visible Invisible.........................................53Three What's Wrong with Their Mice?...............................82Four All in the Brain?............................................110Five The Social Brain.............................................141Six The Antisocial Brain..........................................164Seven Personhood in a Neurobiological Age.........................199Conclusion Managing Brains, Minds, and Selves.....................225Appendix How We Wrote this Book...................................235Notes.............................................................237References........................................................277Index.............................................................325

Chapter One

Those of us who have lived through the period in which molecular biology grew up ... realized that here was an enormous opportunity for a new synthesis ... [an] approach to understanding the mechanisms and phenomena of the human mind that applies and adapts the revolutionary advances in molecular biology achieved during the postwar period. The breakthrough to precise knowledge in molecular genetics and immunology—"breaking the molecular code" resulted from the productive interaction of physical and chemical sciences with the life sciences. It now seems possible to achieve similar revolutionary advances in understanding the human mind. —Francis O. Schmitt, "Progress Report on the Neurosciences Research Program," 1963

In the summer of 1961, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Francis O. Schmitt and a small group of collaborators began to lay the plans for a project that was as simple to state as it was ambitious to imagine: to do for the brain what Watson and Crick had so recently done for the gene when they discovered the structure of DNA and "cracked the genetic code." In the process they were to invent what they would come to term neuroscience (Swazey 1975, 531). "To this end, new devices are being forged," wrote Schmitt in 1967, "with one of which I am closely identified. This is the Neurosciences Research Program (familiarly known as NRP), being a group of 34 gifted scientists—mathematicians, physicists, chemists, neurobiologists, neurologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists—who meet regularly to study the problem and who sponsor a center and a center staff which arranges work sessions on relevant topics of conceptual importance and which communicates the harvest of the work sessions in the program's Bulletin" (Schmitt 1967, 562).

The NRP had grown out of the first Intensive Study Program (ISP) that took place in 1966 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where more than a hundred participants from diverse professional backgrounds gathered to "unify the disparate neurosciences" and shed the light on the emerging trends, issues, hypotheses, and findings that could further advance our knowledge of the human brain (Quarton, Melnechuk, Schmitt et al. 1967). The community brought together by this first study program defined itself by its set of objects of study: the brain, the nervous system, and their relation to their arising "products" (for example, learning, memory, sleep, arousal, reflex, etc.). The challenge, as they saw it, was to bring together the disparate fields of neurologists, behavioral scientists, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians into meaningful communication with one another under the rubric of what Schmitt (1970)—in one of the first journal articles to mention neuroscience in its title—was to call "brain and behavior." In other words, the intention was to integrate not just the neuro disciplines—neurophysiology, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and neurology—but also the psy disciplines of psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, as well as some other less obvious fields such as immunology (Schmitt 1990). Their approach was characterized by the attempt to combine analysis at many levels: cellular, molecular, anatomical, physiological, and behavioral (Quarton, Melnechuk, Schmitt, et al. 1967). Twenty years later it seemed easy to state the program's aim: it was to answer the question "What is neuroscience?" (Schmitt 1985, 1990).

The terms neuroscience and neuroscientist now seem the obvious ones for this kind of research on the brain. But neither the name nor its implications were immediately evident to those visionaries at the time. Judith Swazey tells us that Schmitt first used the terms "mental biophysics" and "biophysics of the mind" to encapsulate his attempt to bring together the "wet, the moist and the dry" disciplines that addressed central nervous system functioning (Swazey 1975). He and his colleagues later worked under the title "the Mens Project" (adopting the Latin term for mind) and initially applied to the NIH for a grant for a "Neurophysical Sciences Study Program"—which was approved in just two weeks. The project only became the "Neurosciences Research Program" in a subsequent grant application to NASA and the term neuroscience made its first public appearance (in the plural) in 1963 in the title of the Neurosciences Research Program Bulletin of that year.

Schmitt was a biophysicist who was recruited to MIT in 1941 at the request of MIT's president, Karl Compton, and its then vice-president, Vannevar Bush, author of the classic text on the endless frontier of science published in 1945 (Bush 1945). Compton and Bush were keen on establishing a "new kind of biology" or "biological engineering" that would combine physics, mathematics, and chemistry (Bloom 1997). This vision, as we have suggested, was explicitly informed by the rapid developments in molecular biology during the 1950s (Schmitt 1990). The new kind of biology that Schmitt was called upon to establish at MIT was a molecular biology heavily rooted in biophysics, biochemistry, and biophysical chemistry (Schmitt 1990). Swazey tells us that when Schmitt was sketching out his plans in 1961, "he listed nine 'basic disciplines' for mental biophysics: solid state physics, quantum chemistry, chemical physics, biochemistry, ultrastructure (electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction), molecular electronics, computer science, biomathematics, and literature research" (Swazey 1975, 531). Physical chemistry, bioelectric studies and computer science seemed to be essential to study the "physical basis" of memory, learning, consciousness, and cognitive behavior.

In a later paper the list was expanded to twenty-five areas of study, and in its progress report to the NIH in 1963, the NRP enumerated fourteen disciplines represented in their program: chemistry, biochemistry, neurochemistry, physical chemistry, mathematics, physics, biophysics, molecular biology, electrophysiology, neurobiology, neuroanatomy, psychology, psychiatry, and clinical medicine. This was in danger of becoming an enterprise without limits! By 1967, however, Schmitt created a simpler diagram that divided the neurosciences into "three intellectual areas":...