In the late 1960s, a new field of philosophical and moral enquiry came into existence. Bioethics, as it soon came to be called, quickly mushroomed: it developed its own journals, its own professional associations, its own conferences, degree programs and experts. It developed very rapidly for many reasons, but no doubt the main impetus was that it was needed. The problems and puzzles that bioethics treats were, and are, urgent. Bioethics developed at a time when medical technology, a kind of technology in which we are all – quite literally – vitally interested, was undergoing significant growth and developing unprecedented powers; powers that urgently needed to be regulated. The growth in life-saving ability, the development of means of artificial reproduction, the rapid accumulation of specialist knowledge, required new approaches, concentrated attention, new focuses and sustained development; in short, a new discipline. Bioethics was born out of new technical possibilities – new reproductive technologies, new abilities to intervene in the genetic substrate of traits, new means of extending life – and the pressing need to understand, to control and to channel these possibilities.

Predicting the future is a dangerous business. Nevertheless, it seems safe to predict that the relatively new field dubbed neuroethics will undergo a similarly explosive growth. Neuroethics seems a safe bet, for three reasons: first because the sciences of the mind are experiencing a growth spurt that is even more spectacular than the growth seen in medicine over the decades preceding the birth of bioethics.