| We’re entering the era of big neuroscience. In a little over a year, the United States, Europe, Japan and Israel have launched brain research projects with big budgets and bold ambitions. Several other countries are expected to follow suit. But what has propelled neuroscience to the vanguard, and what impact will these initiatives have on the field? |
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Recently leaders from the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, Europe’s Human Brain Project and Japan’s Brain/MINDS discussed their ambitious research efforts aimed at nothing less than transforming our understanding of the human brain.
Among those in the roundtable discussion at the Society for Neuroscience, were Sean Hill, William T. Newsome and Hideyuki Okana.
Newsome is the Harman Family Provostial Professor and Professor of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Director, Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Dr. Newsome co-chaired the National Institutes of Health (NIH) working group that developed the long-term scientific vision for the BRAIN Initiative that was released last June.
Okana is a professor of physiology and the dean of the Graduate School of Medicine at Keio University and a member of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute. Dr. Okano is one of two project leaders for Japan’s new national brain-mapping project, Brain/MINDS.
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“There is a revolution occurring in experimental neuroscience,” said Newsome, “There’s the potential for incredibly rapid progress because of new tools that have been invented in the last five to 10 years that are enabling neuroscientists to make measurements of the nervous system that were simply unimaginable 10 years ago. We could think of them in science fiction but we couldn’t think about them in science reality. Yet now these things are becoming reality because of the new technologies.”
“The goal of the BRAIN Initiative is much more complex [than the Apollo program or Human Genome Project]. Our own brains are trying to understand themselves. That is a deep scientific voyage, not an engineering project,” said Newsome.
One of the issues facing these efforts: What is the best dynamic for conducting new and revolutionary research? “[W]e felt we needed strategic collaboration between clinicians and basic researchers,” said Okano. “For example, using a transgenic marmoset model of Alzheimer’s disease, clinicians and basic researchers are working together to identify the changes in the brain's circuitry during mild cognitive impairment and very early stages of Alzheimer's. Such collaborations aim to develop preemptive treatments for this disease before the onset of cognitive impairment. … But we also think bottom-up development is important especially for new technologies for brain mapping. That’s why we also adapted this decentralization mechanism. Our strategy is to use centralization and decentralization in parallel.”
In some ways, neuroscience is learning to follow the lead of other fields, according to Hill. He said neuroscience should follow the lead of physics and astronomy, two fields that have a strong track record of bringing together and funding large, multidisciplinary teams of researchers to study complex phenomena.
"There is a revolution occurring in experimental neuroscience. We could think of them in science fiction but we couldn’t think about them in science reality." |
“It’s going to take a world to understand the brain, so what I really hope we come out with is a new spirit of working together as a global community,” said Hill.
“I felt a little bit like I stepped into the future when I went to a meeting of the virtual observatories in astronomy. They’ve already done a lot of the things that we’re aiming to do…” he said. “If we can have a common infrastructure that allows us to have a globally integrated view of the data that’s being produced, and the tools to run large-scale simulations from this data, we will really have made progress in neuroscience.”
SOURCE The Kavli Foundation
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