A Brief Summary of Group 3 Roundtable discussion

This entry is to summarize Group 3's discussion on the topic regarding collaborative or inter-disciplinary research.

The discussion was on "Should institutions or governments regulate the use of this or other technologies". And being the focus of the discussion, Computational Brain Modeling was explained briefly at the beginning of the discussion, whereby this is technology which uses MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to sketch the brain patterns of human beings. This technology is extremely helpful in the studies of human behaviors and reasoning.

However, this technology has enabled us to access and explore the most important and secret part of human beings, the brain. There will definitely be ethical and scientific issues arising from this area of research. Thus the roundtable discussion focused largely on the positive factors, as well as the adverse effects.

Firstly, there are remarkable positive aspects of the computational brain modeling technology. It helps develop working memories, which is something like a computer RAM in our human brains to improve memory; and also, through the computational modeling, brain structure will be so obvious to see and thus, we can trace the reactions of the brain structure against different stimulations, and in this way, we can understand human behaviors better. Moreover, it will produce great contribution towards medical purposes, for example, the cure of autism and Alzheimer's Disease. It may even change our daily life as scientists may be able to predict if the baby has talents in some areas or weaknesses in others. And according to this scientific prediction, parents can prepare better education for the baby: to let it become the second Beethoven or another Albert Einstein.

However, all these benefits come along with remarkable negative impacts also. And first of all, ethical issues are expectedly argued. Do we have the right to peep at a baby's potential and thus make a sentence to his life to be a success or failure? Do we have the right to trace anyone's behavior by connecting numerous cables on his skull? Or basically do we really should understand the last unknown part of human beings? Specific examples were provided during the discussion to tackle the questions. However, one could not simply weigh the importance between the positive factors and the negative impacts.

After about 20 minutes discussion on the pros and cons, the group finally made a politically correct conclusion that, the use of this or other technologies should be strictly regulated, and deep consideration should be made before adoption of the computational brain modeling technology into our daily life.