Benjamin Franklin said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” But such good habits may no longer be enough: Growing numbers of Americans are turning to new drugs that do a better job of enhancing cognition and alertness.

Almost 7 percent of U.S. college students are buying and using prescription drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall and Provigil to study harder and to get better grades, according to a recent study. Many people see this behavior as cheating, but Stanford law professor Henry “Hank” Greely, JD, and other leading bioethicists see it as an inevitable evolution of caffeine-fueled study sessions.

Greely, chair of the steering committee for the Stanford medical school’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, supports the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs given proper risk management, and recently spoke about the issue during a podcast of the “1:2:1” program, produced by the medical school’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs. An expert on the legal, ethical, and social issues surrounding health law and the biosciences, Greely recently co-authored a Nature paper titled, “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy.”

The interview with Greely can be heard at http://med.stanford.edu/121/2009/greely.html.

To subscribe to “1:2:1,” a series of conversations about advances in health-care policy and biomedical research, visit iTunes at: http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.stanford.edu.1635905012.01635905015.

Stanford University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and patient care at its three institutions — Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of the medical center’s Office of Communication & Public Affairs at http://mednews.stanford.edu.

Stanford University Medical Center
John Stafford, 650-724-2454 (Print Media)
john.stafford@stanford.edu
M.A. Malone, 650-723-6912 (Broadcast Media)
mamalone@stanford.edu