Over in the Nature News and Opinion forum (started by our good friends on Nature’s news team), there’s an interesting discussion going on about the ethics of healthy and sick people using drugs to enhance memory, cognition, etc.

Starting off the discussion is a commentary appearing in this week’s Nature by two Cambridge University researchers. They did an informal survey of their scientist-colleagues in the UK and US and found quite a level of casual use of these drugs.

So in the forum, the authors have laid out several questions they’re asking you to answer, including: Would you boost your brain power? How would you react if you knew your colleagues or students were taking cognitive enhancers? Answer these questions here or in the forum.

One other question I’d like to raise is: given the recent scandal about rampant steroid use in baseball, do you think it would be unfair if some students took cognitive enhancers before taking an exam while others didn’t?

A more whimsical question: could we one day have a similar scandal on our hands, where lots of big-name scientists/academics were discovered to have taken these sorts of drugs?