BRAIN Neuroethics Working Group (NEWG) Meeting – May 2025

The BRAIN Neuroethics Working Group (NEWG), which is a group of experts in neuroethics and neuroscience that serves to provide the NIH BRAIN Initiative with input relating to neuroethics, held a virtual meeting on Friday, May 9, 2025. The meeting videocast is available for public viewing.

Meeting Agenda

Meeting Summary

Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) 

Neuroethics Working Group (NEWG) Meeting 

May 9, 2025 

On May 9, 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative Neuroethics Working Group (NEWG) met virtually to share updates and hear presentations from technical experts and bioethicists on the ethical considerations related to simulated digital duplicates of human brains, also known as digital brain twins. 

Andrea Beckel-Mitchener, PhD, Designated Federal Official of the NEWG, gave the welcome address. She welcomed the NEWG co-chairs, members, speakers, and audience and provided an overview of the meeting. Next, John Ngai, PhD, Director of the NIH BRAIN Initiative, presented updates on the BRAIN Initiative’s neuroethics-related research and events. To date, the BRAIN Initiative has funded 24 neuroethics projects, nine of which are currently active, with the hope of supporting additional research grants. Other updates included the Society for Neuroscience meeting’s  Event in October 2024, as well as a keynote lecture from BRAIN-funded investigator Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz, JD, PhD, highlighting challenges and opportunities in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology. Additionally, the BRAIN Initiative NeuroAI workshop in November 2024 explored the convergence between neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential to drive innovation in healthcare while integrating neuroethical considerations. Dr. Ngai also highlighted a recently published ethics guide and checklist for highly portable magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which highlights emerging ethical challenges as these imaging systems expand to community settings.^[1]

Next, acting NEWG Co-Chair Jim Eberwine, PhD, led a roundtable session where NEWG members provided updates from their respective organizations. Winston Chiong, MD, PhD, shared that the International Neuroethics Society recently met in Munich, Germany, and is currently planning their 2026 meeting, which will likely implement a multi-hub model with a U.S. hub at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. Jen French, MBA, shared that NINDS will be celebrating its 75^th anniversary with a Congressional briefing on June 24, 2025, and the American Brain Coalition will be hosting the Public-Private Partnership NINDS Nonprofit Forum on June 25, 2025. Syd Johnson, PhD, shared several updates, including a book release^[2] on conducting ethical research with nonhuman primates² and a recent oral presentation at King’s College London Neuroscience Society conference on philosophy, neuroethics, and winding paths. Amy McGuire, JD, PhD, provided updates on her BRAINfunded project and the committees she contributes to, including the Research Opportunities in Humans Consortium and the National Advisory Neurological Disorders and Stroke Council. Karen Rommelfanger, PhD, shared new initiatives that stemmed from the BRAIN NeuroAI workshop, including a recent conference in DC bringing together computer scientists and BCI developers to collaborate on BCI technology, as well as efforts at the Institute of Neuroethics to bring diverse communities into discussions about the future of neurotechnology. Caroline Montojo, PhD, shared that the Dana Foundation recently launched the Neurotech Justice Accelerator at Mass General Brigham; the Dana Foundation will be celebrating its 75^th anniversary this year; the Dana Foundation Neuroscience and Society Awards will be presenting its inaugural awardees in June 2025; and the Science Philanthropy Alliance has been engaging in discussions regarding how to support early career trainees and ensure a vibrant future for science. Dr. Eberwine shared that he recently authored a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report on responsible innovation in neuroscience^[3] and coordinated a NAS issue paper on cognitive performance and multiomics.^[4] NEWG Co-Chair Nita Farahany, JD, PhD, shared several initiatives that she is contributing to, including the Uniform Law Commission’s recent launch of a committee on mental privacy, cognitive biometrics, and data; a project with the American and European Law Institutes on the principles of biometrics; the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Neurotechnology; and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s draft recommendations for a consensus global standard on neurotechnology implementation. 

Dr. Farahany then moderated the panelist presentations on digital brain twins. Brain twins are personalized brain foundational models that are trained on large amounts of data to dynamically simulate human brain function. While they are powerful tools that can be used to understand normal brain function and dysfunction in disease states, they also raise potential ethical questions around issues like privacy and data governance, identity and personhood, autonomy and agency, and security and dual use concerns. Dr. Farahany highlighted the importance of both scientific rigor and ethical imagination in navigating conversations about current and future use. 

Viktor Jirsa, PhD, described his work on European Virtual Human Twins (VHT). VHTs are digital representations of the human body and are used to accelerate personalized medicine. He noted that digital brain twins use real-time data from multiple sources to build a comprehensive representation of the brain and enable patient-specific monitoring, diagnosis, and virtual testing of interventions. He described epilepsy as a use case for VHTs, where the brain twins may be used to identify epileptogenic zones and conduct virtual tests for surgical outcomes. He also noted the potential for brain twins in determining medication efficacy in psychiatric disorders. Brain twins offer many benefits, such as enhanced individual precision, cost reduction in treatment, risk-free testing, improved health, and increased acceptance of neurotechnology by the public. However, they also present some potential challenges, such as data privacy and security, data volume, model validation and regulation, and high computational demands. 

Arleen Salles, PhD, presented on the ethical considerations of digital brain twins. It is important to consider the terminology, conceptualization, and framing used to discuss digital brain twins, as unclear terminology may fuel hype cycles, promote unrealistic expectations, provoke unfounded fears, and erode public confidence in science and healthcare. Additionally, the design and formulation of digital brain twin computational models should be transparent, validated, and reproducible to ensure accountability in clinical use. Dr. Salles also discussed philosophical and social considerations of digital brain twins, including issues of access, responsible use in clinical settings, and the impact of digital brain twins on the patient-physician relationship. She stressed the importance of building capacity to engage ethics as an integral part of the scientific process. 

Jana Schaich Borg, PhD, presented on the intersection of AI and digital twins, along with her collaborators, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, PhD, and Vincent Conitzer, PhD. She described her work related to training AI in moral decision-making. Her approach involves asking a set of participants questions regarding ethical decision making, including what they would do in specific cases and the ethical reasoning that guides their decisions, and aggregating the data to create a moral “guardrail” for AI. Trained moral AI models may help to guide stressful clinical decisions such as organ transplant allocation, end of life decisions, and medical triage in the military. While current models are trained in specific moral contexts, the models could eventually become generalized models of moral reasoning. Therefore, moral AI may be seen as an attempt to create a digital moral twin. Dr. Borg expressed an interest in engaging more deeply with neuroscience data, especially electroencephalogram data, as a next step in her research. 

Dr. Farahany invited NEWG members to share their thoughts on the presentations and consider future directions for NEWG in the context of the research and impact of digital brain twins. Members stressed the importance of modeling moral learning in moral AI models to ensure that changes in ethical reasoning over time are accounted for by AI. Members also highlighted the need to ensure that AI models have appropriate guardrails in place and can override impaired human judgment in cases where a person’s moral reasoning may be diminished (e.g., patients who develop dementia) or biased. Members discussed the framing of digital brain twins in different use cases and suggested that digital brain twins may be best understood as an imaging tool in clinical use cases like epilepsy, rather than as a decision-making surrogate. Members also discussed informed consent as a continuous process that should be assessed throughout digital brain twin data collection, management, interpretation, and use. Dr. Farahany recommended organizing a workshop to explore digital brain twins in greater depth or selecting one use case for NEWG to focus on moving forward. 

The meeting ended with presentations from Jen French, MBA, and Michael Young, MD, MPhil, on the Implantable BCI Collaborative Community (iBCI-CC). Ms. French provided an overview of iBCI-CC. iBCI-CC is a collaborative community, a public-private forum that addresses shared challenges and opportunities to advance the field of iBCIs. It operates within the pre-competitive space and focuses on developing regulatory science around iBCIs as they are translated for commercial use. iBCI-CC currently has seven workgroups with specific research foci and goals. Co-presenter Dr. Young further shared details about the Ethics, Neural Data Privacy, and Data Security workgroup within iBCI-CC. The workgroup is currently conducting four projects, including developing safeguards on iBCI data security; developing an informed consent checklist to support researchers, clinicians, institutional review boards, and others for clinical integration of iBCIs; conducting an ethics gap analysis; and building a centralized resource hub for the workgroup’s outputs. Interested individuals can join the iBCI-CC at www.ibci-cc.org. 

For more on the NEWG meeting, view the video recording.