Rewiring the Brain

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DBS does present ethical issues. Volunteers who receive the treatment for depression smile on the operating table as the voltage is turned up and frown as it's turned down, raising questions about just whose mind it is anyway. Advocates argue that when your life has come to ruin as a result of disability, you're concerned less with such philosophical questions than with simply feeling better. Trickier are the cases of brain-damaged patients on whom the operation is, by definition, performed without consent. Dr. Joseph Fins, medical ethicist at Weill Cornell and a principal researcher on the recent study, is untroubled by that, arguing that the very condition that eliminates the ability to consent is the one the surgery seeks to correct. His position is hard to challenge. A patient for whom the neural lights go on for the first time in eight years may react in a lot of ways, but he's unlikely to insist he should have been left in the dark.