Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we trace the social relations emerging in neuroscience research settings involving both small and large patient cohorts. We address questions of how settings at different scales affect ethical research practice and develop propositions for an ethics of scale in neuroscience.

Paper long abstract:

Recent advances in neuroscience entail a variety of ethical questions. Ethical inquiry to date has focused primarily on the outcomes of this research, particularly technological applications, while few scholars have addressed questions of research ethics. Concurrently, neuroscience research introduces another level of complexity, as it tends to operate in diverse research settings. These range from small patient numbers or even individual patients involved in the research to large patient cohorts. Neuroscience therefore emerges within the tension between research settings of different scales on the one hand and the demand for widely applicable research ethics guidelines on the other. The question as to how these settings being embedded in different scales affects what it means to practice research ethically, however, has been reflected only scarcely to date.

In this paper, we draw on research from the Technical University of Munich’s Innovation Network for Neurotechnology in Mental Health (NEUROTECH), a four-year interdisciplinary research initiative dedicated to the study and treatment of mental dysfunction. As embedded ethicists and social scientists within the network, we accompany two research groups: One involves a small number of patients in frequent intensive research interactions to advance the scientific understanding of language disorders using brain-computer-interface technology. The other works with large sets of patient data to measure and modulate brain activity in patients with chronic pain using electroencephalography. By tracing the forms of social relations that emerge from our empirical analysis, we develop propositions for an ethics of scale in neuroscience research at the art.