Bothe studied
Philosophy and
Medicine from 1973 until 1981 in
Tübingen und
Mainz, graduated 1978 in
Philosophy with
Magister Artium, later working for three years at the
Max-Planck-Institute for Neurological Research in
Cologne. He received his PhD in 1983 (thesis:
Artificial Brain Abscess in Cats and Therapy with Antibiotics and Steroids). He specialized in
Neurosurgery and completed his residency training at
Johannes Gutenberg-University in
Mainz. After achieving
habilitation in 1991 he taught at
Hanover Medical School and worked together with Madjid Samii at Nordstadt Hospital in
Hanover. In 1993 he obtained a tenured
professor for Neurosurgery at Westfälische Wilhelms-University in
Münster. In 1992, Bothe organized the
1st International Workshop on Neurobionics, a field aimed at the substitution of impaired functions of brain and spinal cord by neurosurgical implantation of microelectronic systems. For that purpose, he brought together an international consortium of scientists covering for mathematics, neuroinformatics, biological basic research, microsystems, and medicine. In 1991 he launched the International Neurobionics Foundation together with Daniel Goeudevert, Madjid Samii, and other representatives of science, industry, and policy. From 1991 until 1995 he managed the foundation as executive director of the board. He developed microelectronic implants to treat blind patients with damaged
retina (with B. Fischer, J.W. Bartha, et al.), microelectronic therapy to manage
urinary incontinence (with B. von Heyden), and
paraplegia (with J. Holsheimer). Alterations of personality traits (antisocial behaviour concomitant to impaired moral decision making) observable after deep brain stimulation of the
subthalamic nucleus (for therapy of
Parkinsonian patients) brought him to be engaged in the problem of
determinism and
free will from both the perspective of
neuroscience, and
philosophy of mind: He accounts for the conviction that there is merely limited
causality on the relationship between activity of the
brain and
phenomenological events of the 1st person perspective due to
non-linearity of
cerebral information processing and supported
logically by
Gödel's incompleteness theorems. ==References==