By C. Achmed. University of West Florida. 2017.

Furthermore an official government survey of general practice patients in 1998 revealed a high level of satisfaction with the service vigora 100mg mastercard, most notably in the sphere of doctor patient communication: 94 per cent of respondents said that their GP was very or fairly easy to understand; 87 per cent said that all purchase vigora 100mg on line, or almost all, of the time they were given enough information about their treatment (DoH 1998b). The greatly exaggerated perception (among doctors) of their loss of prestige reflects the underlying force driving this process forward: the crisis of confidence of the medical profession itself. In invoking public demand for tighter regulation, the leaders of the medical profession have projected their own insecurities into society. To the extent that there is popular support for measures such as revalidation, it has largely been fostered by leading medical figures, such as GMC president Donald Irvine, in their responses to scandals such as Bristol and the Shipman case. The danger of the revalidation proposals is that they will exacerbate the medical profession’s loss of confidence rather than alleviating it. The problem is not merely that the drive towards revalidation will lead to the creation of scapegoats and a spate of early retirements, though it undoubtedly will. There is an even more serious danger that it will degrade the profession as a whole and do further damage to the relationship between doctor and patient. This statement followed a series of incidents in which environmental protestors had destroyed experimental GM projects and a media campaign for a ban on further developments. The BMA demanded that ‘the precautionary principle should be applied in developing modified crops or foodstuffs, as we cannot at present know whether there are any serious risks to the environment or to human health involved in producing GM crops or consuming GM food products’. The government, squeezed between a recognition of the substantial economic potential of GM products and mounting public anxieties, tried to hold the line. In May the government’s Chief Scientist (Robert May) and Chief Medical Officer (Liam Donaldson) issued a joint statement reassuring the public that there was ‘no current evidence to suggest that the process of genetic modification is inherently harmful’. In early 2000, however, the government crumbled and announced even tighter restrictions on the development of GM foodstuffs. In his classic text, The Mirage of Health, published forty years before the GM controversy, Rene Dubos noted the widespread conviction that maintaining the scientific status quo would safeguard humanity against new threats: ‘It is often suggested that a moratorium on science would give mankind the opportunity to search its soul and discover a solution to the problems that threaten its very survival’ (Dubos 1960:214). He commented that ‘this static formula of survival’ was ‘not new’: ‘indeed it has been used with much biological success by social insects’. Through a highly stratified and efficient mode of organisation, colonies of ants and termites had solved many of 155 CONCLUSION the problems which were the subject of endless discussions and conflicts in human societies.

WALSH These discoveries ushered in the first wave of stimulation studies as a means of reverse engineering brain function generic 100 mg vigora free shipping. Physiologists began to apply electrical stimulation to the cerebral cortex (the outer surface of the brain) 100mg vigora, and in doing so were able to produce movements in muscles on the contra- lateral side of the body (the movements of one side of you body are con- trolled by the opposite side of your brain, so magnetic or electrical stimulation of, say, the left half of your brain will cause movements on the right side of your body). Working on dogs and monkeys, David Ferrier used magnetically induced currents to produce a map of cortical function (Figure 10. Progress in brain stimulation was rapid and reached its first peak when Wilder Penfield and his colleagues applied electrical stimulation to the cortex of patients undergoing neurosurgery and were able to work out the way in which body movements were repre- sented in the brain (Figure 10. They also confirmed the location of speech reception and production areas, identified a third speech-related area and stimulated areas that produced specifically tactile or visual sen- sations. There were several limitations to these methods of investigating brain function. The invasive nature of the experiments meant that they could only be carried out in patients who were awaiting surgery and of course this restricts the kinds of experiments one can do. Another important limit was the specificity of the movements or perceptions produced. The motor cortex is required for fine control and important skills such as giving complex hand signals to other road-users, but Penfield’s stimulation elic- ited actions which were ‘not more complicated than those a newborn infant is able to perform’. Some brain regions, however, which Penfield and Rasmussen referred to as ‘elaboration areas’ apparently did not respond to electrical stimulation because the brain does not only produce perceptual and motor outputs but also transforms them: it would be difficult to imagine how stimulation would elicit awareness of a transformation. For example, at some stage in reading, your brain is able to translate printed letters into sounds but stimulation never caused a subject to report any- thing like this. Reading probably seems so automatic that you may even have difficulty imagining that a written word is translated into a sound. The closest you might get is to read something like ‘the door slammed Reverse engineering the human mind 173 Figure 10. Ferrier (1876) mapped the different functions of the macaque brain (a) by direct stimulation of the cortex and transposed the functions to the human cortex (b). The motor homunculus produced by Penfield and Rasmussen from direct stimulation studies.

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