Neuroscience communication is increasingly taking place on multidirectional social media platforms, creating new opportunities but also calling for critical ethical considerations. Twitter, one of the most popular social media applications in the world, is a leading platform for the dissemination of all information types, including emerging areas of neuroscience such as optogenetics, a technique aimed at the control of specific neurons. Since its discovery in 2005, optogenetics has been featured in the public eye and discussed extensively on social media, but (...) little is known about how this new technique is portrayed and who the users participating in the conversation are. To address this gap, we conducted content analysis of a sample of 1000 tweets mentioning “optogenetics” over a one-year period between 2014 and 2015. We found that academic researchers are the largest group contributing to the conversation, that the tweets often contain links to third-party websites from news organizations and peer-reviewed journals, and that common thematic motifs include the applications of optogenetics specifically for the control of brain activity and the treatment of disease. We also found that the majority of the tweets are neutral in their tone regarding optogenetics. As Twitter serves as a current and dynamic forum for exchange about advances in neuroscience, the conversation about optogenetics on this engaging platform can inform socially-responsive knowledge dissemination efforts in this area. (shrink)

Background: The research community has a mandate to discover effective treatments for neurodegenerative disorders. The ethics landscape surrounding this mandate is in a constant state of flux, and ongoing challenges place ever greater demands on investigators to be accountable to the public and to answer questions about the implications of their work for health care, society, and policy. Methods: We surveyed US-based investigators involved in neurodegenerative diseases research about how they value ethics-related issues, what motivates them to give consideration to (...) those issues, and the barriers to doing so. Using the NIH CRISP database we identified 1,034 researchers with relevant, active grants and invited them to complete an online questionnaire. We received 193 responses. We used exploratory factor analysis to transform individual survey questions into a smaller set of factors, and linear regression to understand the effect of key variables of interest on the factor scores. Results: Ethics-related issues clustered into two groups: research ethics and external influences. Heads of research groups viewed issues of research ethics to be more important than the other respondents. Concern about external influences was related to overall interest in ethics. Motivators clustered into five groups: ensuring public understanding, external forces, requirements, values, and press and public. Heads of research groups were more motivated to ensure public understanding of research than the other respondents. Barriers clustered into four groups: lack of resources, administrative burden, relevance to the research, and lack of interest. Perceived lack of ethics resources was a particular barrier for investigators working in drug discovery. Conclusions: The data suggest that senior level neuroscientists working in the field of neurodegeneration (ND), and drug discovery specifically, are motivated to consider ethics issues related to their work, but the perceived lack of ethics resources thwarts their efforts. With bioethics centres at more than 50% of the institutions at which these respondents reside, the neuroscience and bioethics communities appear to be disconnected. Dedicated ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) programs, such as those fully integrated into genetics and regenerative medicine, provide models for achieving meaningful partnerships not yet adequately realized for scholars and trainees interested in drug discovery for ND. (shrink)