John Cornwell

Duet for one, Almeida Theatre, London (January 22nd to March 14th 2009)

Peter Brook, the theatre director, once told me in an interview that he had spent 10 years attempting to bring science to the stage. It was difficult, he said, because, at the level of the lab bench, science is essentially reductionist and devoid of emotion and drama. He thought of treating the theme biographically, but decided that scientists are not interested in themselves apart from their science (a notion contradicted, I think, in Michael Frayns Copenhagen where the ethical and political conflict between the atomic physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg during World War II is portrayed). ![Graphic][1] In the end Brook decided to dramatize neurological illness, after being impressed with Oliver Sackss book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat . The reason, he said, was that in neurological case histories one sees the ‘wayward molecules meeting the essential human being’. The production that ensued— The Man Who —was a remarkable dramatization of essential humanity surviving and even thriving despite serious neurological conditions. The play ran into problems in rehearsal, as it happened, for Brook was insistent that neurological symptoms, such as visual agnosia, should be understood at a deep and highly accurate level by the actors and director. In the case of The Man Who , he was dissatisfied with the casts ability to render accurately the different neurological conditions based on the available symptomatology in the book. I found myself recalling Brooks struggles with dramatized neurology while watching a performance of Duet for One , … [1]: awp057i1

Ethics and neuroscience

More than 20 years ago, the late Professor Stuart Sutherland, reviewing Gerald Edelman’s The Remembered Present on the neurobiology of consciousness, wrote the following opinion: It is a characteristic of ageing brain scientists to turn their minds to the problem of consciousness: Sir John Eccles, Roger Sperry and Sir Charles Sherrington are examples. Gerald M. Edelman, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1972 for his work on immunology and who has more recently been doing research on the brain, has now joined their ranks. While their ambition is admirable, the result is usually lamentable. Yet the intervening decades have seen a proliferation of research programmes in the field of consciousness, with modest advances in some basic areas of cognitive neuroscience: work on vegetative state and post-coma cognitive capacities; explorations of emotions, physical awareness and vision; perception and intentionality, memory and learning. At the same time, many books have flowed from the laptops of ‘neurophilosophers’ proposing explanations for the deeper mysteries of consciousness: the mind–brain relationship, free will; our sense of being ‘selves’ or ‘souls’; the possibility of objective moral truths; the tendency for more than a few of us to be religious and believe in the immortality of our ‘souls’. Are their theories worth the effort of keeping abreast with them; do they constitute anything like a set of agreed qualitative conclusions? The current genre of neuroscientifically informed writings on philosophy of mind, mostly marked by a reductive and eliminative spirit, began in earnest back in the late 1980s and early 1990s with titles such as Roger’s Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (1989), Dan Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (1991) and Francis’s Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul (1994). The concerted aim at the time was to quash, with the aid of new brain …

Forever bear the consequences

Heinous experiments were performed during the second world war in the name of medical science. A new account of the atrocities argues that to truly grasp present-day medical ethics, these wounds must be remembered, finds John Cornwell