Priorities for brain science; making a difference.

How we ought to prioritise research spending is a difficult problem.  On the one hand, we may wish to target research resources on the problems of most pressing social need, but this may be to pose questions which science is not in a position to answer.  A good example of this approach was President Nixon's "War on Cancer" in the 1970s.  On the other hand, we may wish to target research resources on the problems most interesting or most tractable for scientific reasons, but accept that this might not be to target the most pressing social needs.  The relative spend on non-infectious diseases prevalent in the West over spending on infectious diseases prevalent in the developing world may be an example of this.

Current thinking is that research priorities can be set most fairly not by specifying principles of justice in research spending, but rather by making the decision-making process more open, transparent and perhaps democratic.  This can involve patient or citizen involvement in research programme design or research funding decision-making.  This presentation will describe and analyse the options, and consider how far they are ethically satisfactory.