[LINK] Obama, Study of Human Brain

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

The (inner) space race ..

"Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain"

By JOHN MARKOFF www.nytimes.com February 17, 2013


The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to 
examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of 
its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did 
for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early 
as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of 
neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the 
knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into 
perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to 
develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s 
and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental 
illnesses.

Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in 
artificial intelligence.

The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected 
to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month. 

And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they 
had participated in planning for what is being called the "Brain Activity 
Map" project.

The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money would 
be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal constraint or 
how far the research would be able to get without significant federal 
financing.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as 
an example of how the government should “invest in the best ideas.”

“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our 
economy — every dollar,” he said. 

“Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to 
Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, 
devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not 
the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.”

Story C. Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological 
Disorders and Stroke, said that when she heard Mr. Obama’s speech, she 
thought he was referring to an existing National Institutes of Health 
project to map the static human brain. “But he wasn’t,” she said. “He was 
referring to a new project to map the active human brain that the N.I.H. 
hopes to fund next year.”

Indeed, after the speech, Francis S. Collins, the director of the National 
Institutes of Health, may have inadvertently confirmed the plan when he 
wrote in a Twitter message: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in 
#SOTU.”

A spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy 
declined to comment about the project.

The initiative, if successful, could provide a lift for the economy. “The 
Human Genome Project was on the order of about $300 million a year for a 
decade,” said George M. Church, a Harvard University molecular biologist 
who helped create that project and said he was helping to plan the Brain 
Activity Map project. “If you look at the total spending in neuroscience 
and nanoscience that might be relative to this today, we are already 
spending more than that. We probably won’t spend less money, but we will 
probably get a lot more bang for the buck.”

Scientists involved in the planning said they hoped that federal financing 
for the project would be more than $300 million a year, which if approved 
by Congress would amount to at least $3 billion over the 10 years.

The Human Genome Project cost $3.8 billion. It was begun in 1990 and its 
goal, the mapping of the complete human genome, or all the genes in human 
DNA, was achieved ahead of schedule, in April 2003. A federal government 
study of the impact of the project indicated that it returned $800 billion 
by 2010.

The advent of new technology that allows scientists to identify firing 
neurons in the brain has led to numerous brain research projects around the 
world. Yet the brain remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries.

Composed of roughly 100 billion neurons that each electrically “spike” in 
response to outside stimuli, as well as in vast ensembles based on 
conscious and unconscious activity, the human brain is so complex that 
scientists have not yet found a way to record the activity of more than a 
small number of neurons at once, and in most cases that is done invasively 
with physical probes.

But a group of nanotechnologists and neuroscientists say they believe that 
technologies are at hand to make it possible to observe and gain a more 
complete understanding of the brain, and to do it less intrusively.

In June in the journal Neuron, six leading scientists proposed pursuing a 
number of new approaches for mapping the brain.

One possibility is to build a complete model map of brain activity by 
creating fleets of molecule-size machines to noninvasively act as sensors 
to measure and store brain activity at the cellular level. The proposal 
envisions using synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism for brain activity.

“Not least, we might expect novel understanding and therapies for diseases 
such as schizophrenia and autism,” wrote the scientists, who include Dr. 
Church; Ralph J. Greenspan, the associate director of the Kavli Institute 
for Brain and Mind at the University of California, San Diego; A. Paul 
Alivisatos, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; 
Miyoung Chun, a molecular geneticist who is the vice president for science 
programs at the Kavli Foundation; Michael L. Roukes, a physicist at the 
California Institute of Technology; and Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at 
Columbia University.

The Obama initiative is markedly different from a recently announced 
European project that will invest 1 billion euros in a Swiss-led effort to 
build a silicon-based “brain.” The project seeks to construct a 
supercomputer simulation using the best research about the inner workings 
of the brain.

Critics, however, say the simulation will be built on knowledge that is 
still theoretical, incomplete or inaccurate.

The Obama proposal seems to have evolved in a manner similar to the Human 
Genome Project, scientists said. “The genome project arguably began in 
1984, where there were a dozen of us who were kind of independently moving 
in that direction but didn’t really realize there were other people who 
were as weird as we were,” Dr. Church said.

However, a number of scientists said that mapping and understanding the 
human brain presented a drastically more significant challenge than mapping 
the genome.

“It’s different in that the nature of the question is a much more intricate 
question,” said Dr. Greenspan, who said he is involved in the brain 
project. “It was very easy to define what the genome project’s goal was. In 
this case, we have a more difficult and fascinating question of what are 
brainwide activity patterns and ultimately how do they make things happen?”

The initiative will be organized by the Office of Science and Technology 
Policy, according to scientists who have participated in planning meetings.

The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects 
Agency and the National Science Foundation will also participate in the 
project, the scientists said, as will private foundations like the Howard 
Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Md., and the Allen Institute for 
Brain Science in Seattle.

A meeting held on Jan. 17 at the California Institute of Technology was 
attended by the three government agencies, as well as neuroscientists, 
nanoscientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm. 

According to a summary of the meeting, it was held to determine whether 
computing facilities existed to capture and analyze the vast amounts of 
data that would come from the project. The scientists and technologists 
concluded that they did.

They also said that a series of national brain “observatories” should be 
created as part of the project, like astronomical observatories.

--

Cheers,
Stephen