By Angela Nitzke-Martin

I have no doubt that at some point after having my blood drawn, I have likened the experience to torture. Those minutes spent prospecting for gold in my evidently intractable veins is certainly unpleasant, and on occasion painful, but torturous — no. It is an attempt to add drama to a pretty boring story, and absurd to suggest that a medical professional would support suffering that wasn’t ultimately in the patient’s best interest. After all, they do have to take an oath.

Maybe that is why “Medical Complicity in Torture,” the title of a lecture given by New York University’s Allen Keller was a bit shocking. CIA physicians and psychologists seem out of place in military prisons, but they do play a role in interrogations and were present at Guantanamo Bay. Should medical professionals participate in torture or enhanced interrogation? “Moral and scientific reasons ultimately lead to the same conclusion: That, no, we shouldn’t be doing this,” said Keller, an associate professor of medicine and director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture.

Keller spoke at the University of Chicago on Wednesday as part of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series. In his lecture, Keller drew from vast experience dealing with torture victims and the report he coauthored for Physicians for Human Rights titled, “Aiding Torture.” The paper cites the CIA Inspector General’s report released in 2004 that said psychologists not only monitored enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, but also kept data on the prisoners’ reactions.

It is impossible to separate the physical, psychological and social dimensions of health, said Keller. “The consequences of torture are all interrelated.” Prisoners who are not mortally wounded may still experience intense psychiatric trauma with long lasting effects. Preventing death or severe injury does not preclude inflicting harm.

Although not as mind-boggling as what the definition of “is” is, there is still debate about what constitutes torture. We have the UN’s definition and the American Medical Association’s definition, but it boils down to something much simpler for Keller. “If it looks like torture, smells like torture, it’s probably torture,” said Keller.

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As described on Monday and hinted at all week, this weekend marks the start of Neuroscience 2009, the annual mega-conference of more than 30,000 neuroscientists. After years of staging the meeting in areas with distractingly nice climates such as New Orleans, Orlando and San Diego, this year should be all business with the rainy chill of Chicago keeping people indoors. But there’s still a lot of fun to be had, with big-time speakers, immersive poster sessions, the never-ending hunt for the best vendor knick-knack giveaway and the night-time socials. Because of Neuroscience’s massive size, there are a million different ways to navigate a path through the science, but here’s a quick extremely long guide to what I’m looking forward to experiencing. Remember to tune in to ScienceLife all weekend (and through Wednesday) for coverage.

Saturday: Magicians Were the First Neuroscientists

Each year one of the most interesting lectures falls under the sober heading of “Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society,” which basically means “we invited someone from outside of neuroscience to talk about neuroscience.” At previous meetings I’ve attended, that meant hearing public figures such as the Dalai Lama and Frank Gehry offering their own perspective on the brain, the mind and thinking - necessary reminders that the microscopic neurons those 30,000 scientists are concentrated on actually add up to some pretty amazing things in practice. 

This year’s Dialogues speakers are neuroscientists of a different sort: magicians Apollo Robbins and Eric Mead. Even though I saw a local version of this talk earlier this year with Robbins and neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde (which I wrote about it for the Tribune), I’m excited to see it again, because it really is a neat demonstration of how magicians have used the brain’s limitations to produce convincing illusions. Robbins, whose act is centered on his considerable abilities as a pickpocket, is a master of using diversion to direct a person’s attention one direction while he slips off their watch from another angle. As Robbins and Martinez-Conde explained back in January, this deceptively simple trick actually says a lot about how the brain shifts attention from stimulus to stimulus, and how a normal brain is “tricked” may help us learn about the neurobiological process that underlie an attentional disorder like ADHD. You can watch a video of a similar symposium organized by Martinez-Conde back in 2007 called “The Magic of Consciousness” - which includes Teller of Penn & Teller in a rare speaking role.

Also Saturday: We’re only two weeks away from the University of Chicago’s big Darwin conference, but I still will probably take in at least part of the symposium on Evolution of Brain and Behavior. Harvard’s Elizabeth Spelke caps off the day with a lecture on how the brain processes math - thankfully, it’s scheduled early in the conference, before my own brain will surely grow too tired to handle such a heavy topic.

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(photo courtesy of Nature)

Bruce Lahn knew that his 2005 papers on the recent evolution of brain genes might stir up some controversy. In the journal Science, the University of Chicago professor of human genetics and his colleagues studied two genes involved in regulation of brain size during development. Intriguingly, they found variants of these genes that are favored by natural selection and are more prevalent in some geographic groups than others. Despite caveats about the complex, multi-dimensional nature of genetic differences, Lahn expected that people on the fringe might twist his research to justify racist beliefs. But he was  surprised at the degree of controversy, particularly the negative reaction from other scientists who distorted his conclusions to make straw-man arguments and even questioned the worth of doing such research in the first place.

That experience, Lahn says now, made him wiser about the way that human genetics research is interpreted by the public and even his scientific peers. But rather than shy away from the type of research that provoked such hubbub, Lahn decided that scientists needed a new moral framework to deal with rapidly growing information about how genes differ between individuals and groups. In an opinion piece published in the journal Nature today, Lahn and co-author Lanny Ebenstein argue that scientists and society at large must embrace the idea of genetic diversity, rather than persist in the more palatable assumption, increasingly disproven by science, that there are no meaningful genetic differences between geographic and ethnic human groups.

“I think the danger really is in the moral attitudes of the people themselves,” Lahn said when we discussed his essay earlier this week. “Instead of trying to suppress the science we should try to build a moral consensus that is constructive to the overall well-being of the species. I think that’s what’s important.”

“The truth about human diversity cannot be changed, but attitudes can change,” he continued. “I think it’s better to change attitudes than to hide factual truths.”

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Thanks to scientific and medical progress, the average life expectancy of a person in North America is 80 years and increasing. But in sub-Saharan Africa, the average lifespan is half that figure, and dropping. Technology is often said to have made the world a much smaller place, so how can those of us fortunate enough to be in the developed world help close that shocking life expectancy gap? That question, according to the University of Toronto’s Peter Singer, is “the mother of all ethical challenges.”

Singer, a professor of medicine and an internationally-renowned expert on bioethics, returned Wednesday to the University of Chicago, the school where he studied medical ethics 22 years ago. And boy did we put him to work, asking him to deliver the opening speeches for two separate but related launches: this year’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics seminar series, and the school’s new Global Health Initiative. In both lectures, Singer drew from vast experience in facilitating efforts to improve health in Africa, India, China and other areas of the developing world, offering valuable advice for what doctors, scientists, and universities could do to help such efforts.

It’s nice to think that simply sending doctors and the fruits of scientific research to needy countries would solve these problems, but as Singer explained, there are several obstacles to merely hoping public health will spread around the globe by osmosis. Singer showed this Nature Review Immunology figure from 2002, which illustrates how developing countries lag behind in vaccinations given to children despite the development of vaccines for more diseases. Lack of scientific discovery relevant to the developing world, ethical and social barriers and a “brain drain” of scientific talent from Africa and Asia have all contributed to these inequalities, Singer said.

But Singer also gave reasons for optimism. In 2003, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (for which Singer serves as an advisor), issued their Grand Challenges in Global Health, funding vaccine research and efforts to limit diseases spread by insects - scientific questions more pressing to to poor countries. Six years later, those projects are already bearing fruit, such as the effort to infuse staple crops of poor populations with nutrients, the creation of genetically modified mosquitos that don’t spread malaria or the combination of several vaccines into a single injection. 

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