Brain imaging techniques embody the dual nature of any technology. On the one hand, new breakthroughs promise an array of future medical wonders. On the other, uses of the technology for non-medical purposes (neuromarketing, neurosecurity) are raising substantial concerns around privacy, moral and ethical issues. Scientific communities and policy networks around the UK have come to recognise the importance of fostering ‘upstream public engagement’, that is, early public dialogue and deliberation around potentially controversial scientific advances in order to avoid the kind of public outrage and media misrepresentation that they believe have jeopardised other research agendas in the past. This paper presents the case of a deliberative process that took place in Scotland in 2010. The Brain Imaging Dialogue (BID) brought together scientists, health practitioners, philosophers, religious representatives, social scientists, citizens, policy makers and legal experts in a series of deliberative events (4 phases, 9 months) about new uses of brain imaging around the world. The BID represented an effort to create a community of inquiry to deliberate on the implications of current and future uses of these emerging technologies, and, on the basis of such dialogue, inform policy deliberation in Scotland. The novelty of the process lies in its bottom-up approach. A scientific community, rather than a governmental agency, brought the initiative forward. This paper tells the story of the process from an independent insider perspective, focussing on the difficulties of fostering cross-disciplinary deliberative dialogue, as well as on the challenges of forwarding the results to parliamentary decision-making arenas.
