Fortunately, researchers facing such dilemmas have help. From that moment in 1972, organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences, as well as academic institutions like Stanford Medicine, have marshalled resources and created guidelines to support the ethical conduct of research in biology.

“Worrying about these issues is important,” said Hank Greely, JD, the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor in Law and director of Stanford University’s Center for Law and the Biosciences. “It’s critical that researchers are open about what they are planning and why it is important, and that they understand the instrumental value of involving ethicists and discussing ethical issues.”

“It’s a dilemma, particularly in neuroscience,” Greely said. “When researchers study a living human brain in a living human person, there are strong ethical boundaries about what they can do. They can’t put in or take out a gene to see how it affects a person’s behavior. So we use models. But the more similar to a human your model is, the more you risk backing into an ethical quandary.”

Greely is a member of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program, a group of researchers who study functional human brain tissue in the lab and in the brains of mice — something they expect will dramatically advance our understanding of psychiatric and genetic diseases affecting neural function. In 2021, the National Academies of Science issued a report noting the potential benefit for people struggling with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, autism, schizophrenia and depression.

Scientists also need to realize it is important not to conduct their experiments in a vacuum, Greely says. The media and the general public play important roles in how research is perceived.