Obama to Unveil Initiative to Map the Human Brain
President Obama
on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with
$100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to
understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University will help lead a study of the brain in action.
A senior administration scientist compared the new initiative to the
Human Genome Project, in that it is directed at a problem that has
seemed insoluble up to now: the recording and mapping of brain circuits
in action in an effort to “show how millions of brain cells interact.”
It is different, however, in that it has, as yet, no clearly defined
goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the
scientists involved and may take more than year.
The effort will require the development of new tools not yet available
to neuroscientists and, eventually, perhaps lead to progress in treating
diseases like
Alzheimer’s and
epilepsy and traumatic
brain injury. It will involve both government agencies and private institutions.
The initiative, which scientists involved in promoting the idea have
been calling the Brain Activity Map project, will officially be known as
Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain
for short; it has been designated a grand challenge of the 21st century
by the Obama administration.
The initiative exists as part of a vast landscape of neuroscience
research supported by billions of dollars in federal money. But Dr.
Newsome said that he thought a small amount of money applied in the
right way could nudge neuroscience in a new direction.
“The goal here is a whole new playing field, whole new ways of
thinking,” he said. “We are really out to catalyze a paradigm shift.”
Brain researchers can now insert wires in the brain of animals, or
sometimes human beings, to record the electrical activity of brain cells
called neurons, as they communicate with each other. But, Dr. Newsome
said, they can record at most hundreds at a time.
New technology would need to be developed to record thousands or
hundreds of thousands of neurons at once. And, Dr. Newsome said, new
theoretical approaches, new mathematics and new computer science are all
needed to deal with the amount of data that will be garnered.
As part of the initiative, the president will require a study of the
ethical implications of these sorts of advances in neuroscience.
While news of the announcement has been greeted with enthusiasm by many
researchers in fields as diverse as neuroscience, nanotechnology and
computer science, there are skeptics.
“The underlying assumptions about ‘mapping the entire brain’ are very
controversial,” said Donald Stein, a neuroscientist at Emory University
in Atlanta. He said changes in brain chemistry were “not likely to be
able to be imaged by the current technologies that these people are
proposing.”
Emphasizing the development of technologies first, he said, is not a
good approach. “I think the monies could be better spent by first
figuring out what needs to be measured and then figuring out the most
appropriate means to measure them.” he said. “In my mind, the technology
ought to follow the concepts rather than the other way around.”
However, supporters of the initiative argued that it could have a
similar impact as the Sputnik satellite had in the 1950s, when the
United States started a significant nationwide effort to invest in
science and technology.
“This is a different time,” said Michael Roukes, a physicist at the
California Institute of Technology. “It makes sense to have a brain
activity map now because the maturation of an array of nanotechnologies
can be brought to bear on the problem.”
While the dollar amount committed by the Obama administration does not
match the level of spending on the Human Genome Project, scientists said
that whatever was spent on the brain initiative would have a
significant multiplier effect. The Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif.,
is contributing money, said Terrence J. Sejnowski, head of the
institute’s computational biology laboratory, adding that the project
would have an impact at the neighboring University of California, San
Diego, campus.
“One concrete example is that the chancellor has gotten excited about
this and has decided that it is a great thing to invest in,” Dr.
Sejnowski said. “That means hiring new faculty and creating new space.”
The project grew out of an interdisciplinary meeting of neuroscientists
and nanoscientists in London in September 2011. Miyoung Chun, a
molecular biologist who is vice president of scientific programs at the
Kavli Foundation, had organized the conference. Her foundation, she
said, supports the idea that the next big scientific discoveries will
come from interdisciplinary research.
“Federal funding is scarce these days, and I realized we need inspiring
projects that can awake everyone’s imagination,” she said. “It occurred
to me that this is a very inspiring idea.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 4, 2013
