Imaging genetics and the power of combined technologies: a perspective from neuroethics

Imaging genetics has emerged as a powerful and sensitive approach to the study of functional genetic variations and brain responses in psychiatric and neurologic disorders. Ethics issues in contemporary neuroscience as they apply separately to genetics and neuroimaging have been a growing focus for research but, to date, there has not yet been a rigorous exploration of the ethical dimensions of the territory in which they overlap. Here we propose that the ethics challenges associated with the combination of these methods call for an expanded “neuro-space” in which societal and ethical values are closely and explicitly integrated with the new science. We build specifically on the model delivered by Roffman et al. [Roffman JL, Weiss AP, Goff DC, Rauch SL, Weinberger DR (2006) Neuroimaging-genetic paradigms: a new approach to investigate the pathophysiology and treatment of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. Harv Rev Psychiatry 14:78-91] for neuroimaging, and develop the argument that the ethics issues parallel the heightened discriminative and cumulative power of imaging genetics. In the new combined space, features of discriminative power concern better differentiation of disease, sometimes by ethnicity, and incidental findings. Clinical utility, prediction and intervention, and stigma and labeling reflect a common ground between discriminative and cumulative power. Privacy, autonomy, response sensitivity and attitudes, resource allocation for research and for health care, and commercialization, are features of cumulative power. Parallel to the clinical features highlighted in the Roffman et al. map, the combined space yields additional neuroethics features. These are characterized by new knowledge and new implications for health care, justice, and policy. We conclude by examining these features in the context of public health at the interface of emerging new neurotechnologies.