Law, Science & the Aging Brain
A New Project of ASU’s Neuroscience & Law Program
The Neuroscience & Law Program of ASU’s Center for Law, Science & Innovation (LSI), in collaboration with experts from the Mayo Clinic and other partners, is launching a new program on Law, Science & the Aging Brain. As society continues to age, with the baby boomers moving into old age while average lifespan continues to increase, the medical, social and legal issues affecting older citizens are becoming increasingly important. For example, memory and intellectual capabilities are vulnerable to both decay and interference through neurologic injury. Recent scientific and medical developments relating to the aging brain create new opportunities to benefit both individuals and society generally. At the same time, these developments will create new legal, ethical and social issues that will need to be addressed. The goal of this project will be to identify and address these legal, ethical and social issues in ways that advance scientific progress while also protecting individual rights and societal interests.
Initial Topics (may be expanded as project proceeds)
- Pre-Symptomatic Screening for Neurodegenerative Diseases – New genetic, neuroimaging and other scientific tools can help predict future onset of clinical diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms appear. Such early diagnosis and prediction may help facilitate more effective and targeted prevention and mitigation strategies and assist with life planning and family preparations. This information could also have important psychological, discriminatory, and legal consequences, raising challenging legal, ethical, and policy issues.
- Long-Term Impacts of Traumatic Brain Disease: Traumatic brain injuries incurred earlier in life, including concussions and other brain injuries, can have debilitating effects on the brain that may not manifest until later in life. This latency period has important implications for risk assessment, patient treatment, and legal liability.
- Healthy Aging: A growing number of nutritional, behavioral and pharmacological interventions are being advanced as promoting healthier aging and cognitive resilience. Legal oversight is needed both to identify products with fraudulent or deceptive claims and to ensure valid interventions are able to be brought to market in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Activities
The project will be focused around two events. The first will be an invitation-only expert workshop in November 2016 that will convene leading experts from science, medicine, law, ethics, and public policy to discuss and elaborate on the three substantive topics relating to the aging brain listed above, and to identify areas of consensus as well as open questions (disagreement?) about the legal, ethical and policy implications of the scientific and medical innovations in these three areas. One or more academic publications will be produced from this workshop to communicate to the wider community the progress that was made at the workshop as well as the remaining questions to be addressed. Finally, a large public conference will be held to further communicate and discuss these issues in November 2017, which will be targeted at a multi-disciplinary audience including scientists, health care providers, lawyers, judges, journalists, psychologists, counselors, advocates for the elderly, and students.