NEW YORK — Healthy people should have the right to boost their brains with pills, such as those prescribed for hyperactive children or memory-impaired older folks, several scientists contend in a provocative commentary.
College students are already illegally taking prescription stimulants such as Ritalin to help them study, and demand for such drugs is likely to grow elsewhere, they say.
“We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function,” and doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night’s sleep, these experts wrote in an opinion piece published online Sunday by the journal Nature.
The seven authors, from the United States and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York.
