Wednesday, May 30, 2007

A whitewashed crow soon shows black again



A whitewashed crow soon shows black again (Chinese Proverb)

Dedicated to Tareq AlBaho and to his morally adept colleagues Hans Herrmann, Francoise Virieux and the
Nobel Prizewinner Pierre-Gilles de Gennes (who died last week on 18 May 2007).

We have a Nobel prize winner (Physics 1991) who tried and failed to conceal criminal activity by his senior staff against a junior researcher. Those individuals were later tried and convicted in 2000 and 2001. An interesting story - More to follow.

Great intellect implies neither humanity nor ethical insight.
It's all in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex several inches behind the brow.
See Wall Street Journal, 11 May 2007 Scientists Draw Link Between Morality And Brain's Wiring.

"To analyze their moral abilities, Dr. Koenigs and his colleagues used a diagnostic probe as old as Socrates -- leading questions: To save yourself and others, would you throw someone out of a lifeboat? Would you push someone off a bridge, smother a crying baby, or kill a hostage?

The effort to understand the biology of morality is far from academic, said Georgetown University law professor John Mikhail. The search for an ethical balance of harm is central to medical debates on vaccine safety, organ transplants and clinical drug trials."
Hat tip S.S for neurology.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Great intellect implies neither humanity nor ethical insight.
It's all in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex several inches behind the brow."

Haha! Great quote! I've quoted you on my facebook profile. :D

Anonymous said...

You should write about the story of Caroline Phinney - she was bullied at the University of Michigan and her problems were ignored by UM who retaliated instead (an "intellectual rape"). She won a 1.2 million settlement.



Don't know whether she ever did donate some of that money however.