[EMMAS] Commercial Alert Asks Emory University to Halt

For Immediate Release: Monday, December 1, 2003
For More Information Contact: Gary Ruskin (503) 235-8012
Commercial Alert Asks Emory University to Halt Neuromarketing Experiments

http://www.commercialalert.org/index.php/category_id/1/subcategory_id/82/art
icle_id/205

[Emory was founded by the Methodist Church in 1836 upon a core of ethical and
religious values. Its mission is to create, preserve, teach, and apply
knowledge in the service of humanity. Last year, Emorys Board of Trustees
affirmed that this includes a commitment to use knowledge to improve human
well-being.

The Emory School of Medicine has a particular responsibility under that
declaration. Its own mission statement commits it to advance the detection,
treatment and prevention of disease processes. Emory Medical School exists
to eliminate disease, not encourage it. It certainly does not exist to
produce research that can  and predictably will  be used to for marketing
that tends to increase disease and human suffering.]

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http://www.commercialalert.org/index.php/category_id/1/subcategory_id/82/art
icle_id/205

Commercial Alert Asks Emory University to Halt Neuromarketing Experiments

Commercial Alert and prominent psychology experts sent a letter today to
Emory University President James Wagner, requesting that Emory stop
conducting neuromarketing experiments. These medical experiments on human
subjects are unethical because they will likely be used to promote disease
and human suffering.

If Emory University is found to have violated federal ethics rules regarding
experiments on human subjects, it may lose its federal research funding.<<

<snip>

The letter to Emory University President James Wagner follows.

Dear Mr. Wagner:

The realm of marketing and market research has never been a model of ethical
scruple. But recent developments there are truly macabre in their
implications. The hucksters have enlisted research labs to map the brains
activation responses in order prod desires for particular products.

This new field is called neuromarketing. It seeks, in the words of Forbes
magazine, to find a buy button inside the skull. It sounds like something
that could have happened in the former Soviet Union, for the purposes of
behavior control. Yet it is happening right here in America, at a major
university  your university. "The neuroscience wing at Emory University,
the New York Times reports, is the epicenter of the neuromarketing world."

That is a dubious honor. Universities exist to free the mind, and enlighten
it. They do not exist to find new ways to subjugate the mind and manipulate
it for commercial gain. Emorys quest for a buy button in the human skull
is an egregious violation of the very reason that a university exists. It
also likely violates the principles of the Belmont Report, which sets out
guidelines for research on human subjects in the United States.

Emorys descent into neuromarketing is a project of something called the
BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, which is the leading
neuromarketing research firm. (The name itself is Orwellian: the whole point
of neuromarketing is to bypass thought, not encourage it.) The Institute in
turn is part of BrightHouse, an advertising agency whose clients have
included Coca-Cola, Pepperidge Farm, K-Mart and Home Depot. Brighthouse uses
the Emory University Hospitals Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine to
conduct its neuromarketing experiments.

The BrightHouse website boasts of having the most-advanced neuroscientific
research capabilities and understanding of how the brain thinks, feels and
motivates behavior. This knowledge of the brain enables corporations to
establish the foundation for loyal, long-lasting consumer relationships,
the website says. Loyalty through brain mapping, in other words.

The founder and chief executive officer is Joseph Alden Reiman, an adjunct
professor at Emory Universitys Goizueta Business School. According to the
BrightHouse website, Reiman is also Senior Research Fellow in the Department
of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of
Medicine. The chief scientist at the Institute is Clinton D. Kilts,
professor and vice-chair for research in the Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences.

Dr. Kilts is an expert in addiction. He has published such articles as
Neural activity related to drug craving in cocaine addiction, and Imaging
the roles of the amygdala in drug addiction.

Dr. Kiltss research interests include drug craving induced by mental
imagery of drug use-related scenes, according to his Emory University
School of Medicine web page. Is Dr. Kilts now using his knowledge of
addiction to sell products such as Coke? Is he working on mental mapping to
induce product cravings through the use of product-related scenes? Dr. Kilts
has declined to respond to repeated calls regarding his neuromarketing
research.

The Belmont Report requires a systematic assessment of risks and benefits in
research on human subjects, and that the benefits outweigh the risks. The
risks of this research are obvious, as is the moral repulsiveness. The
benefits are more questionable, except to corporations such as Coca-Cola.

At the most basic physical level, neurological marketing research relies on
the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging on human subjects. Strong magnets can
harm human subjects if they have metal in their bodies (e.g. cardiac
pacemaker, aneurism clips, intrauterine devices, some dental work, body
piercings) or are carrying metal, such as coins or jewelry. Such harm is not
likely but the possibility does exist. Research subjects occasionally report
dizziness or nausea when their heads are moved within the bore of the
magnet.

Thats on top of any unknown adverse effects of placing a human subject in
the intense magnetic field required for an MRI. It is hard to believe that
this procedure is helpful when not medically required.

But such potential physical harms are secondary. The real risk of
neuromarketing research is to the people  including children  who are the
real targets of this research. Already, marketing is deeply implicated in a
host of pathologies. The nation is in the midst of an epidemic of
marketing-related diseases. Our children are suffering from extraordinary
levels of obesity, type 2 diabetes, anorexia, bulimia, and pathological
gambling, while millions will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco.
Such illnesses affect also the population at large, as does chronic debt
that people incur to support the consumption that the marketing industry
encourages.

Neurological marketing is a tool to amplify these trends. It is hard to
think of a single benefit that could result from teaching corporate
marketers how to press a buy button in the minds of individual Americans.
Is there really a person in America who is insufficiently impelled to eat
more Pepperidge Farm cookies or drink more Coke? Where would you rank the
task of increasing this impulsion on the list of the nations pressing
needs?

Some might protest that neuromarketing research could be used to shut a buy
button off as well as on. Conceivably. But it is not clear why corporations
would support research that will cause people to buy less of their products.
If the university and the researchers involved were to sign written
statements promising that this research would be used only for such
purposes, on pain of stiff financial penalties, the argument might become
remotely credible. But even then, the prospect of behavior control at that
level has totalitarian implications that require much more discussion than
has occurred to date.

Given the prospect of dubious social benefit and almost certain social harm,
it is hard to see how Emorys neuromarketing research meets the ethical
standards of the Belmont Report for experimentation on human subjects.

As you know, if Emory University has run afoul of the Belmont Report, it may
lose all federal research funding. If necessary, we may ask the federal
Office for Human Research Protections to investigate whether Emory
Universitys neurological marketing research violates the principles of the
Belmont Report.

But more importantly, it is hard to see how neuromarketing research meets
the ethical standards for university research, especially a university such
as Emory.

Emory was founded by the Methodist Church in 1836 upon a core of ethical and
religious values. Its mission is to create, preserve, teach, and apply
knowledge in the service of humanity. Last year, Emorys Board of Trustees
affirmed that this includes a commitment to use knowledge to improve human
well-being.

The Emory School of Medicine has a particular responsibility under that
declaration. Its own mission statement commits it to advance the detection,
treatment and prevention of disease processes. Emory Medical School exists
to eliminate disease, not encourage it. It certainly does not exist to
produce research that can  and predictably will  be used to for marketing
that tends to increase disease and human suffering.

If Emory University takes its own mission seriously, it should challenge
this abuse of medical knowledge and technology to manipulate people for
commercial purposes.

At this time, we ask that you immediately:

1) Forbid the BrightHouse Institute, or any other entity, from using any
Emory University property, equipment, office space or facilities, including
its MRI, for the purposes of conducting neuromarketing research; and,

2) Publicly release Emory Universitys Institutional Review Board reviews of
the neuromarketing research.

Sincerely,

Rev. Tom Grey, Executive Director, National Coalition Against Legalized
Gambling
Jane M. Healy, PhD, author, Failure to Connect and Endangered Minds
Susan Linn, EdD, Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School;
Co-founder, Stop Commercial Exploitation of Children
Jonathan Rowe, Director, Tomales Bay Institute
Gary Ruskin, Executive Director, Commercial Alert
V. Susan Villani, MD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins
Medical School

<------letter ends here------>

For more information about neuromarketing, see Commercial Alerts
neuromarketing web page, at:
http://www.commercialalert.org/index.php/category_id/1/subcategory_id/82/art
icle_id/202.

Commercial Alert is a national nonprofit organization whose mission is to
keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from
exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community,
environmental integrity and democracy.

Commercial Alert has more than 2000 members, representing all 50 states and
the District of Columbia. For more information, visit our website at
http://www.commercialalert.org.

.phone: 503.235.8012   |  fax: 503.235.5073   |  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
4110 SE Hawthorne Blvd. #123; Portland, OR 97214-5426

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