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U.S. Big Brain Project Takes Next Big Step

The group of neuroscientists  that is advising the Obama administration’s Big Science brain project delivered to the NIH its final report on June 5 with a recommendation that $4.5  billion be spent through the 2025 federal fiscal year to develop a set of advanced technologies that will enhance understanding of how neural circuitry works.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


The group of neuroscientists that is advising the Obama administration's Big Science brain project delivered to the NIH its final report on June 5 with a recommendation that $4.5 billion be spent through the 2025 federal fiscal year to develop a set of advanced technologies that will enhance understanding of how neural circuitry works.

If fully funded, the proposal for Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies would become the largest targeted brain science undertaking ever, even outscaling the Human Brain Project, a European Union endeavor with an allocation of more than a billion euros that is being spent over 10 years. The project would consume about 5 percent of the NIH's annual funding for research related to the brain—and additional funding could be forthcoming from other agencies such as DARPA.

The NIH will award $40 million in grants for the brain initiative by September and the Obama administration has proposed $100 million in funding for the coming funding year.


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The group of neuroscientists advising the NIH delivered a report that identifies the ambitious goal of furnishing within 10 years an analysis of circuit wiring diagrams of hundreds or thousands of healthy and diseased human brains, though not at full molecular resolution. The project has set a goal of developing, faster, inexpensive tools that can trace out circuit diagrams at fine-scale resolution.

The brain initiative is intended to push into practical use a set of technologies that exist as either drawings on the back of a napkin or graduate student projects. The report mentions the prospect, for instance, of using nano-scale diamond particles as detectors of electrical fields emitted from a neuron that would then fluoresce to report on the activity of the cell.

It is hoped that brain wiring diagrams will reveal patterns of neural activity that ultimately give insight into the underlying basis for sensory function, thought, memory and emotion—and will provide a new understanding of what in these circuits goes awry in psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. At a news conference, Cori Bargmann, a co-chair of the advisory committee, tried to provide an economic rationale for the spending proposed:

"To use numbers, the entire cost of the space program to put a man on the moon added up to about one six pack of beer for every person in America living at the time. And the entire cost of the Brain Initiative proposed here adds up, inflation corrected, to about one six pack of beer for each American over the entire 12-years of the program."

A justification for moving ahead could also be witnessed at a major academic meeting on cognition that took place through June 3 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Neuroscientist Terence Sejnowski, an advisor to the brain initiative, gave the closing remarks. During his talk, he cited a previous symposium at the research facility that he had been at in 1990. Back then, it was only possible to record from one neuron at a time, and to do so for one or two neurons per day. Recording from a monkey's brain could consume three or four years of a graduate student's time. Electrodes and some dyes now enable recording from 100 or more neurons at a time and machine learning techniques can process the data.

The earlier meeting also had little theory that had any solid grounding in mathematics. Sejnowski mentioned a 1979 article from Scientific American in which Francis Crick, who had recently moved to the Salk Institute to begin neurobiology studies, had written on the need for allowing "all neurons of just one type to be inactivated, leaving the others more or less unaltered"—a futuristic musing that has been realized today with a technology called optogenetics. (Footnote: After the talk, James Watson, Crick's one-time partner, approached Sejnowski told him that he "was living in a dream world"—he also used more pungent language. Watson said that the the brain initiative was not dealing with issues of more practical medical relevance. In fact, the report to the NIH specifically emphasizes the need for basic research needed to develop techniques that will then help make progress with neurological and psychiatric diseases.)

 

Image Source: Kigsz/Wikimedia Commons

Note: Story has been updated

 

Gary Stix, Scientific American's neuroscience and psychology editor, commissions, edits and reports on emerging advances and technologies that have propelled brain science to the forefront of the biological sciences. Developments chronicled in dozens of cover stories, feature articles and news stories, document groundbreaking neuroimaging techniques that reveal what happens in the brain while you are immersed in thought; the arrival of brain implants that alleviate mood disorders like depression; lab-made brains; psychological resilience; meditation; the intricacies of sleep; the new era for psychedelic drugs and artificial intelligence and growing insights leading to an understanding of our conscious selves. Before taking over the neuroscience beat, Stix, as Scientific American's special projects editor, oversaw the magazine's annual single-topic special issues, conceiving of and producing issues on Einstein, Darwin, climate change, nanotechnology and the nature of time. The issue he edited on time won a National Magazine Award. Besides mind and brain coverage, Stix has edited or written cover stories on Wall Street quants, building the world's tallest building, Olympic training methods, molecular electronics, what makes us human and the things you should and should not eat. Stix started a monthly column, Working Knowledge, that gave the reader a peek at the design and function of common technologies, from polygraph machines to Velcro. It eventually became the magazine's Graphic Science column. He also initiated a column on patents and intellectual property and another on the genesis of the ingenious ideas underlying new technologies in fields like electronics and biotechnology. Stix is the author with his wife, Miriam Lacob, of a technology primer called Who Gives a Gigabyte: A Survival Guide to the Technologically Perplexed (John Wiley & Sons, 1999).

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