The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative is focused on developing new tools and neurotechnologies to revolutionize our understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease, in large part to address the growing societal impact of neurological, mental health, and substance abuse disorders. Recent advances in neurotechnology are delivering unprecedented ways to interrogate and modulate brain function, and the BRAIN Initiative is focused on translation for human medical uses over the next decade. Since its inception, the NIH component of the BRAIN Initiative has utilized an iterative model of integrating ethics into the scientific trajectory of the Initiative, most recently with the creation of a Neuroethics Division of the NIH BRAIN Initiative Multi-Council Working Group. The Division serves as a resource of expertise, to help the BRAIN Initiative navigate issues involving ethics. Here we discuss the BRAIN Initiative, and its implications and aspirations for neuroethics. We also discuss new opportunities for collaboration and for integrating stakeholder voices.

The rapid development of human genome editing (HGE) techniques evokes an urgent need for forward-looking deliberation regarding the aims, processes, and governance of research. The framework of anticipatory governance (AG) may serve this need. This article reviews scholarly discourse about HGE through an AG lens, aiming to identify gaps in discussion and practice and suggest how AG efforts may fill them. Discourse on HGE has insufficiently reckoned with the institutional and systemic contexts, inputs, and implications of HGE work, to the detriment of its ability to prepare for a variety of possible futures and pursue socially desirable ones. More broadly framed and inclusive efforts in foresight and public engagement, focused not only upon the in-principle permissibility of HGE activities but upon the contexts of such work, may permit improved identification of public values relevant to HGE and of actions by which researchers, funders, policymakers, and publics may promote them.