Neuroscience and neuroethics is not only the title of Donald Kennedy's editorial this week in Science magazine, but it is also the theme for this coming week for myself. I'm off this morning to San Diego for the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. On Wednesday, I'll be flying to Philidelphia to give a talk on neuroethics at the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.

As Kennedy wrote, "Neuroethics, it appears, is a subject that has "arrived." The Dana Foundation is, for the second time since 2002, sponsoring a special lecture on this topic at this year's annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. AAAS, publisher of Science, also joined with Dana to produce a conference on "Neuroscience and the Law" earlier this year. The U.S. President's Council on Bioethics is now devoting serious attention to the topic. Companies are deploying functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map brain activity as they assess the product preferences of prospective consumers (Coke or Pepsi?). There's even a new discipline called neuroeconomics. So something is going on here. What got it started, and where is it headed?"

The answer is we are beginning to see the emergence of a neurosociety, where advancing neurotechnology will impact all aspects of our daily lives.