News and Commentary Archive

Explore recent scientific discoveries and news as well as CLBB events, commentary, and press.

Mission

The Center for Law, Brain & Behavior puts the most accurate and actionable neuroscience in the hands of judges, lawyers, policymakers and journalists—people who shape the standards and practices of our legal system and affect its impact on people’s lives. We work to make the legal system more effective and more just for all those affected by the law.

CLBB Director of Law & Ethics to lead HMS Master’s Program in Bioethics

As of fall 2014, CLBB Director of Law & Ethics Rebecca W. Brendel, JD, MD, will join the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics to lead the development of a new Master’s Program in Bioethics. Originally established as the Division of Medical Ethics, The Center was rebranded in spring 2014 to serve as a convener for faculty who will collaborate with the ethics services at the HMS affiliates and with ethics programs at schools throughout Harvard University. Dr. Brendel will develop and then lead the new Master’s Program in Bioethics at HMS.

The Master of Bioethics Degree, beginning fall 2015, will combine resources from the Center for Bioethics, Harvard teaching hospitals, and departments across the University in a one-year full time course of study and is open to working professionals holding a terminal degree in any discipline. A core group of applicants is expected from medicine, law, nursing, public health, social work, public policy, scientific and biotechnology research, journalism, and business.

Rebecca W. Brendel

Dr. Brendel is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Law & Ethics at CLBB. An expert consult-liaison psychiatrist and ethicist, Dr. Brendel has published widely on issues including voluntary psychiatric hospitalization (2014), evaluation of capacity to appoint a healthcare proxy (2013), and legal issues including mandatory reporting and informed consent (2010).

Dr. Brendel will be stepping down as Clinical Director of the Home Base Program — a collaboration of the Red Sox Foundation and MGH — in order to step into the new role at the Center for Bioethics.  Continue reading »

Putting a Number on Pain

By Tom Ulrich | Vector, Boston Children’s Hospital’s science and clinical innovation blog | July 30, 2014

“How much pain are you in?” It’s a harder question than you think. Tools for assessing patients’ pain—be they children or adults—rely on their perception: a subjective measure that eludes quantification and can change in response to any number of emotional, psychological or physiological factors.

Being able to objectively quantify pain could open the door to better pain management (especially for patients with chronic or neuropathic pain), better anesthetic dosing during surgical procedures, better understanding of addiction (and how to avoid it) and more.

To do so, we need measurable markers: physiologic parameters that reliably and quantitatively change during the experience of pain. But according to pain researcher David Borsook, MD, PhD—of Boston Children’s Hospital’s departments of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Radiology—discovering such markers requires a better understanding of the larger context and of events that trigger pain, a perspective he refers to as “systems neuroscience.” Continue reading »