“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

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.

Neuro

The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the MindBy Nikolas Rose Joelle M. Abi-Rached

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14961-5

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

The Neuromolecular Brain

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”: molecular neurobiology, working at the molecular, subcellular, and cellular level; neural science, dealing with “net characteristics,” including neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neuropathology; and behavioral or psychological science, or what he called “molecular psychology” and which he—like so many of his successors—found the most challenging to integrate (Schmitt 1967, 562).

Swazey argued that the NRP had a “catalytic role in creating and promoting the growth of a neuroscience community…. [T]he term and concepts of ‘neuroscience,’ of a new type of integrated multidisciplinary and multilevel approach to the study of the brain and behavior, came into being with the NRP” (Swazey 1975). While those working in this area would retain their specific disciplinary allegiances—molecular biologists, neuroanatomists, biophysicists, psychologists, and so on—they would also locate themselves within this emerging scientific project with a common goal: they would think of themselves as neuroscientists. By 1964, this aspect of the project had achieved some success. The term neuroscientist was first used publicly in an article in the journal Technological Review titled “A neuroscientist sees ‘invisible colleges’ as a means of meeting the information problem,” with specific reference to the “invisible college” of the recently created Neuroscience Program “activated and made ‘visible’ in Boston.” To create the neuroscientist, then, required, first and foremost, the creation of a matrix—the invisible college—that could bind those who identified with this term into some kind of community.

For Schmitt, as for other prominent scientists of the time, it would be through the unification or “synthesis” of these diverse and separate disciplines and through the reductionist molecular approach (i.e., a bottom-up approach) that substantial breakthroughs could be delivered (cf. Kay 1993). He based this belief on his perception that the success of molecular biology, genetics, immunology, and biophysics arose from the multidisciplinary dialogue between three traditionally separate disciplines: physics, chemistry, and biology. “It now seems possible,” Schmitt wrote in a 1963 progress report, “to achieve similar revolutionary advances in understanding the human mind…. By making full use of [the approaches of physiology and the behavioral sciences] and by coupling them with the conceptual and technical strengths of physics, chemistry, and molecular biology, great advances are foreseeable” (quoted in Swazey 1975, 530). This was not to be simply a natural evolution of scientific knowledge; it was an explicit project to anatomize the workings of mind in terms of brain, to be undertaken at a novel, neuromolecular level: “[M]olecular neuropsychology is becoming ripe for study by the methods and concepts that proved significant in molecular genetics and molecular immunology. It seems inevitable that the problem of the mechanisms of brain function will soon become the primary intellectual salient, offering the greatest promise for the life sciences—indeed, as Schroedinger has suggested, of all science” (Schmitt 1967, 561–62). This, then, was to be the promise, and the mission, of the new molecular vision of the brain that was born in 1962.

How Should One Do the History of the Neurosciences?

But surely this claim, that the neurosciences were born in 1962 is absurd, or at the least, purely semantic. As we have already mentioned, human beings have been concerned with the brain, the nerves, let alone the mind, since time immemorial, and rigorous reflections, often based on empirical examples, go back at least to the Greeks. So why focus on 1962? To explain this, it is necessary to reflect for a moment on different ways of writing the history of the neurosciences.

Consider, for example, one of the first articles published in French to use the term neuroscience, written by André Holley in 1984: its title was “Les neurosciences: Unité et diversité” (Holley 1984). Holley argued that there is one object of study, and one objective of these new sciences of the brain, namely, “the knowledge of the nervous system, its function and the function of the diverse phenomena that emerge from it” (Holley 1984, 12; our translation). Yet, says Holley, on the other hand there are a plurality of methods and concepts. Thus, for him, the neurosciences were born with the convergence of all these sciences around one object of study and concern: the brain. This account of unity in the face of conceptual and methodological diversity seems to fit the account given in most ‘authorized’ versions of the history, which usually take the form of chronologies of the great thinkers, establishing a lineage of precursors for the present (Garrison and McHenry 1969; DeJong 1982; Brazier 1984, 1988; Finger 1994). These are often supplemented, for the modern period, by compilations of autobiographical accounts of key figures in the manner of oral history (Healy 1996, 1998, 2000; Squire 1996; Tansey 2006).

There are also a number of institutional versions of this history: many university departments of neuroscience have created their own accounts or time lines of the milestones—key discoveries, key texts, key persons. Some versions are presented from the perspective of the various disciplinary trajectories—from the perspective of neurology, neurochemistry, or neuroimaging. For example, the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), has its own history and has produced eleven DVDs of interviews with prominent neuroscientists. Along the same lines, accounts of other societies and organizations have been published as well, for example, the International Neuropsychological Symposium, founded in 1951 (Boller 1999); the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO), founded in 1961 (Marshall, Rosenblith, Gloor, et al. 1996); the International Society for Neurochemistry, founded in 1965 (McIlwain 1985); and the European Brain and Behavior Society, founded in 1968 (Marzi and Sagvolden 1997).

In addition, numerous memoirs have been written by famous neuroscientists of the twentieth century (Ramón y Cajal 1937; Schmitt 1990; Hodgkin 1992; Kandel 2006), as well as abundant biographies and articles on the contributions and achievements of particular individuals, either in the form of “neuro-anniversaries” (Eling 2001) or as part of the development of a particular concept or a discovery, for example, the discovery of acetylcholine by Henry Dale (Tansey 2006) or the discovery of dopamine by Arvid Carlsson (Benes 2001). Other published papers name this or that historical figure as the true founder of neuroscience (Changeux 1985, 1997; Wills 1999). Alongside these accounts of founding fathers—and they were mostly men—we find accounts of the major discoveries, such as the synapse (Rapport 2005), and of major controversies, such as the famous “war of the soups and the sparks” between the proponents of electrical transmission and neurotransmission in the central nervous system (Valenstein 2005). And, starting in the 1990s, the history of neuroscience becomes a kind of subdiscipline in its own right, with the founding of the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, and then of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (Rosner 1999).

What are they for, all these histories? What role do they play for the neurosciences themselves? As in other truth-claiming disciplines, a historical sensibility is internal to the science itself. It is performative: it establishes a respectable past for neuroscientific knowledge, thus securing a basis for its future. Knowingly or not, such histories solidify the scientificity of the present state of the science whose tale they tell by presenting it as the culmination of a long trajectory of the progress of knowledge. Georges Canguilhem terms such accounts “recurrent history”—the history written and rewritten by almost every science, viewing the past from the perspective of its own regime of truth. These histories establish a division between the sanctioned and the lapsed. The sanctioned: a more or less continuous sequence that has led to the present—a past of genius, of precursors, of influences, of obstacles overcome, crucial experiments, discoveries, and the like. The lapsed: a history of false paths, of errors and illusions, of prejudice and mystification, and all those books, theories, arguments, and explanations associated with the past of a system of thought but incongruous with its present. To point to this use of history within science is not to denounce it but to characterize its constitutive role: using the past to help demarcate a contemporary regime of truth, to police the present, and to try to shape the future.

Central to such a history is a succession of predecessors. This quest for precursors fabricates “an artifact, a counterfeit historical object” and ignores the fact that the precursor is the creature of a certain history of science, and not an agent of scientific progress; Canguilhem quotes Koyré: “It is quite obvious (or should be) that no-one has ever regarded himself as the ‘forerunner’ of someone else…. [T]o regard anyone in this light is the best way of preventing oneself from understanding him” (Koyré 1973, 77; quoted in Canguilhem 1994, 51). Indeed, as Canguilhem points out (1968, 21): “The precursor is a thinker who the historian believes he can extract from one cultural frame in order to insert him into another, which amounts to considering concepts, discourses and speculative experimental acts as capable of displacement or replacement in an intellectual space in which reversibility of relations has been obtained by forgetting the historical aspect of the object dealt with.”

For such histories, we can reinterpret the arguments of those precursors in terms of our own concepts and problems. The objects of study—the brain, the nerves—remain static, intact, brute entities in a world external to thought, which are merely grasped more or less adequately by a succession of thinkers. But the kind of historical epistemology practiced by Canguilhem recognizes the historicity of the very object of explanation, the set of problems, issues, phenomena that an explanation is attempting to account for. In a way, André Holley is right when he says that the neurosciences (in the plural form) are centered on one object of study: “la connaissance du système nerveux, de son fonctionnement et des phénomènes qui emergent de ce fonctionnement” (Holley 1984, 12). He insists on this ‘unity’: “pluralité des methods, diversité des concepts mais unité de l’objet” (ibid.).

(Continues…)

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