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The Complicated Legacy of Terry Wallis

In 2003, when Terry Wallis regained consciousness after spending 19 years in what his doctors thought was a permanent vegetative state, he helped to launch a golden age of brain science. Over the past two decades, writes Joseph J. Fins, “researchers have learned how to identify covert consciousness with functional neuroimaging, begun to develop drugs and devices that can accelerate the return of consciousness, and now even consider the ethical implications of these advances.”
 
But this remarkable scientific progress has not been accompanied by greater access to care. When Wallis fell ill in early 2022, his family’s struggle to find him an appropriate rehabilitation facility in their rural state was symptomatic of the difficulties facing marginalized people with disorders of consciousness.  
 
Wallis’s death last year, writes Fins, “was a harsh reminder that the revolution in brain science … will remain incomplete until scientific progress is matched by an obligation to bring these advances into clinical practice in ways that are meaningful and just.”

Read more about how advances in medical knowledge produce new obligations to care.

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BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES
Ambiguities in Neurotech Regulation
Ambiguities in Neurotech Regulation
New neurotechnologies could help patients, argue Lucille Nalbach Tournas and Walter G. Johnson, if regulators ensure these devices serve those who need them most.
Plus: As policymakers attempt to bring critical semiconductor chip manufacturing to the United States, Yin Li argues that “taking the wrong lessons from China could have unintended consequences for the US industry.”
WHAT WE’RE READING
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Imagine the ability to download your entire consciousness: every memory, thought, and sensation accessible forever. Now imagine the ability to access everyone else’s, too … but only at the cost of sharing your own. Would you do it? How would you decide? The Candy House by Jennifer Egan explores the consequences of such a Collective Consciousness (as the trademarked system is called in the book) on a set of interconnected characters, spanning different time periods and points of view. Some of the novel’s characters also appeared in the author’s hit A Visit from the Goon Squad. But don’t worry if you haven’t read Goon Squad or, like me, read it when it first came out (Egan signed my copy at the 2011 National Book Festival) and don’t remember details. The Candy House stands on its own. Let it never be said that a novel cannot be great literary fiction and thought-provoking science fiction. This is a terrific read.

—Josh Trapani, Senior Editor

THE WINTER 2023 ISSUE
The Winter 2023 edition of Issues explores the gray zones of international research; how a metaphor borrowed from consumer electronics helped reinvigorate the electric vehicle industry; fixing academia’s approach to sexual harassment; and much, much more.
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Header illustration by Shonagh Rae.
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Issues in Science and Technology is a publication of Arizona State University and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Copyright © 2023 National Academy of Sciences, All rights reserved.


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