When emerging biomedical technologies converge or collide

Neuroethics is concerned with the ethical, legal, and policy issues raised by the neurosciences and their applications in medicine and society. However, neuroscience sometimes involves other emerging biomedical technologies, such as genetics, regenerative medicine, and synthetic biology, which generate their own ethics and policy conundrums. When emerging biomedical technologies converge or collide in a single project, application, or product, challenges are compounded. These challenges may be mitigated by the development of shared models for ethical analysis focused not on the details of a particular technology but rather on the nature of the class of technologies, such as whether they are emerging, rapidly evolving, and ethically contentious. These challenges and characteristics, and a framework approach to managing them, are the focus of this chapter.