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MGH-UCLA Human Connectome Project
This visualization shows the grid structure of major pathways of the human brain, as mapped by the NIH Blueprint Human Connectome Project. Click on the image for a Flash interactive exploring the brain.
BOSTON — The brain-mapping project that the Obama administration wants to facilitate isn't necessarily aimed at adding billions of dollars to the money already being spent on research, according to the scientists who inspired the idea. Instead, it's aimed at harnessing new technologies to uncover the secrets of neural function less expensively and more completely.
"We can bring down the cost and increase the quality of the technology," said Harvard geneticist George Church, one of the researchers who proposed the Brain Activity Map Project last year. "We are trying to work with current funding [levels] to bring down the cost."
The New York Times reported on Monday that the White House has embraced the idea of having the Office of Science and Technology Policy spearhead the project, with participation by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. The federal initiative is to be unveiled as early as next month, the Times quoted its sources as saying.
The roots of the project go back months if not years earlier: The goals of the BAM Project were outlined last June in a white paper appearing in the journal Neuron. The researchers proposed a 15-year international effort to map the functions of the brain's complex neural circuitry to an unprecedented degree — using traditional tools such as magnetic resonance imaging in combination with novel technologies such as nanosensors and wireless fiber-optic probes that can be implanted into the brain, and genetically engineered cells that can be linked up with brain cells to record their activity.
The scientists' idea was to start with mice and work their way up to primates. "We do not exclude the extension of the BAM Project to humans, and if this project is to be applicable to clinical research or practice, its special challenges are worth addressing early," they wrote.
The discoveries generated by the effort could point to new strategies for dealing with brain-centered maladies such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism and schizophrenia.
Church and his colleagues compared the BAM Project's potential impact to the effects of the $3.8 billion Human Genome Project, a 13-year-long effort that analysts say generated $796 billion in economic activity. "After the genome project, we brought the cost [of whole-genome sequencing] down by a million-fold," Church said. Advanced technologies for studying brain activity could bring savings on the same scale, he said.
In this month's State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama made a similar point: "Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar. 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 material to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race."
Debate over the dollars
The Times' report on the project quoted scientists familiar with the BAM Project as saying they hoped it would receive as much support as the Human Genome Project did, which amounted to more than $300 million a year. That was widely interpreted as implying that more than $3 billion would be shifted over to the effort from other federally supported research over the next decade – a prospect that rankled some observers.
"If there is money for frivolities like the Billion Dollar Brain Project, doesn't it show that NIH has too much money?" evolutionary geneticist Detlef Weigel of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology wrote in a Twitter comment.
Some scientists noted that the European Union has already established a Human Brain Project in cooperation with a range of research centers, including some that are expected to play a role in the BAM Project. The European-led project is due to receive up to 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion) over the next decade.
Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, pointed to a blog posting in which he said grand projects in biology such as Project ENCODE for DNA analysis were emerging as the "greatest threat" to individual discovery-driven science because they crowded out less costly, smaller-scale studies.
"It's one thing to fund neuroscience, another to have a centralized 10-year project to 'solve the brain,'" Eisen wrote in a Twitter update.
Emphasis on existing funds
Church said he couldn't speak for the federal government, and he didn't rule out the possibility that the project would receive new funding. But he noted that the concept outlined last year emphasized better coordination of existing publicly and privately supported brain research efforts, which already receive hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
"We want to use existing funds," he told NBC News.
The BAM Project received a strong endorsement from Allan Jones, chief executive officer of the privately backed Allen Institute for Brain Science.
"Our own work over the last 10 years has shown that large-scale brain research and sharing vast data sets and tools publicly for use by scientists around the world accelerate progress and catalyze important research advances across the field," Jones said in a statement emailed to NBC News. "In early 2012, we launched our large-scale initiative to understand brain activity, creating a foundation for other related projects."
The Allen Institute helped organize a workshop that gave rise to last year's white paper proposing the BAM Project, and it is also a partner in the Human Brain Project. Jones said such efforts "complement our work at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and hold promise for helping to bring on new discoveries about the human brain and bring us ever closer to much needed advances in medicine."
More about the brain:
- How scientists are hacking into brain waves
- Paul Allen starts up 'brain observatory' with $300 million
- Flash interactive: Road map of the mind
- Cosmic Log archive on brain science
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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As a Parkinson's patient it sounds great,as a tool of government it sounds scary. I just there are safeguards built in to protect people from abuse.
I would spend twice that amount to find and cure the mental defect that causes people to become liberal Democrats. ;-)
Just go live in psychopathville and you'll meet all your fellow conservatives every day.
Take your political comments and shove em where the sun doesn't shine. You gung-ho political commenters act like you're in elementary school, you never say anything productive and just sling mud. Enough with this junk, it's getting old and sickening.
They should use people who are conservatives like yourself. That way the brain is smaller, simpler and easier to map. Watch out for Limbaugh Syndrome where the neural response is a series of dittos.
I would spend twice that amount to find and cure the mental defect that causes people to become liberal Democrats. ;-)
lol! I think liberals are weeding themselves out of the food chain. Same sex marriages and free abortions and contraceptives will do the trick... in a generation or two, liberals will go the way of the dodo bird!
If your theory is correct Pride, why do conservatives fight it every inch of the way?
One could make similar arguments about conservatives and looser gun regulations, but I'll resist the urge to get deeper into this...
It continues to amaze me how people can twist an article about absolutely anything to put forward their own political and/or religious agendas. Totally flabbergasting.
Just me, Since Obama has embraced this brain mapping concept and NBCNews has published two stories on it in two days... it is a political issue.
Some folks would prefer the administration focus its attention on more important issues facing the country right now, like job creation, the deficit, Iran and N.Korea's nuclear bomb ambitions, etc. all more important issues! That's his job!
Try having a little vision. You don't think it is important to figure out the causes of conditions like parkinsons, alzheimers, autism, bipolar, which this might assist greatly? Perhaps Kennedy should have ignored the space program and focused on Cuba instead. sigh....
@ Robin: So, Presidents can't have a science and technology policy?
I see...
Sorry, but anyone in the job has to deal with a thousand issues, and delegate authority as s/he deems appropriate (which is not dictated by NBC editorial choices). This is but one of them.
As for 'focus,' I'll see your two stories, and raise you the thousands of print and on-line stories on all the other issues you listed.
Why is understanding our brain and mind so important?
Because both our the root problem and our main capacity as individuals and as society, is our mental makeup. If we can understand this deeply, perhaps we can understand and possibly solve some of these problems.
Once we can understand the neural networking of the human brain, we can begin to build advanced artificial intelligence neural networks using 3D printing. This will once day become the greatest empowerment any nation can possibly have, whether in war or in peace. - Rick Carter
Yep. We can build our own replacements. Robots that can design and build smarter robots. Then they can decide they don't need people any more.
Don't worry, I'm sure they'll come out with a patch for that :p
On a serious note, the sci-fi scenario of robot replacing humanity after deeming it "unnecessary" rests on far too many absurd assumptions about how we build and program those robots.
Bringing down the cost of doing this vital science, and doing it bigger and better is a goal we should all be in favor of. And, given the social costs of caring for people with Alzheimer's, autism and a host of other brain conditions, the money spent on projects like these has to be thought of as an investment in lowering costs for us all down the road. Compared to the cost of a couple of F-35s, this isn't very much money to help us understand the very organ that makes us human, but the real value in a project like this go well-beyond the applications we can immediately see, like better understanding of Alzheimer's, to the applications we can't even think of yet, like better understanding of how children learn, or how to use brain activity to move a robot arm for someone who is paralyzed.
Ed- Exactly, anyone thnking we don't need a beter understanding of the brain hasn't read the statistics for the number of American's that are expected to develop Alzheimer's and require extended care over the next several decades. In fact the cost of this research is a drop in the bucket of what that care will cost. If this effort lead to results that offset or reduced the amount of care the elderly require, it would easily pay for itself.
Sadly most people think research is a straight A -> B path. That does happen, but it is often starts at A and passes through every other letter before getting to B - otherwise we wouldn't need the research in teh first place because we'd already have all the answers.
I agree we need a better understnading of the brain. My concern is we need the process a little - rather than the scientists/institutions being able to patent the results of these stdies and thus profit from them at the expense of the PArkinson or Alzheimer patients, the outcomes of the research should belong to the people of the US and thus somehow (and I admit not sure best way) control the cost of any product/treatment that comes out of the research.
Holly, your "fear" that you just described is the basic system in place for developing all medicine. The idea that the government should "own" the technology and distribute it as a public good (which it can't easily do, since it's not in the business of pharmacueticals) would usurp the entire system that currently provides medicine to patients and would virtually promise supply shortages and inefficiency in delivering the medicines.
Yeah, it'd be great if everything everyone really needed was supplied by the government, which we all know is NEVER motivated by greed or at all corrupt (HA!), but thankfully, we know better. Your fear that someone may - horrors - profit from coming out with groundbreaking new cures is quite misplaced.
Why are the public servants borrowing money from our children and grandchildren to pay for this academic study? If the results could generate a return on investment will it be used to repay this debt???
SAINSolutions - see my comment to Ed Hubbard above - comments like yours demonstrate an abilty to see the horizon. Since rougly 1/3 of our public debt in the US is directly attributable to healthcare costs for seniors and research like this has great potential for improving the health of the elderly, this very well could pay for itself. $300M a year is pennies compared to Medicare.
Too bad government decisions are not usually made relying solely [sic] on empathy and reason. If this brain research is truly White House backed, the prayer breakfasters there will be disappointed when the results can't find where and when ensoulment takes place LOL.
Those guys n gals are afraid first, that it will confirm they never did have one to begin with and second, It will also make it much more difficult for them to continue to prey upon their praying masses.
7 of 9(10) to Hugh, wake up. Question, who owns your shoes ?
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Wonder why he said that.
Questions are more telling than answers.
I find it a greater tragedy that empathy and reason are so often at odds with each other. Sure, I feel sorry for poor people who have families but can't get jobs, but how much is a society supposed to spend supporting people who contribute nothing to the system and have a demonstrated inability to make sound decisions?
Then again, if our political class were purely divided between those who rely on empathy and those who rely on reason, then we'd be much better off than we are now.
From nuclear power to jet engines, government funded research always has benefits for society, whether intentional or not.
Really interesting. I wonder if they can find out the speed of a thought.
Another step closer to establishing "Thought Police".
We can expect this to end badly. Who wants to pay a "Fantasy Tax" for daydreaming? Only a fool would trust a "Police Brain Scan", and we know exactly what Big Business will do with this - ads broadcast directly into your head, all day, every day. You'll be buying sh!t you don't want without even knowing you did it.
I like how you take a groundbreaking technology with so many positive theoretical applications and take it several steps further to a calamitous conclusion by combining it with unrelated technologies. That's some impressive pessimism. Are you surprised that all the genetic modification studies don't have us swimming in flesh-eating mutants by now?
What you call 'fantasy,' others call 'creativity.'
Or do you think all new ideas come from a P,O, Box in Tasmania, or something...?
I'm glad to see that the debate around this research is about spending allocation and centralization, and not asinine subjects such as the sanctity of the mind or whether we can afford research funding while trying to reduce the deficit.
That said, I think the researchers that question the NIH funding have a point; rather than a glitzy, big-budget mega-project, that money might be better spent on spreading grants to several smaller projects with more direct and immediate applications.
But in the end, I'm just glad we're still putting money into research!
I hesitate to wade into this politically contentious arena, but for those who might be interested in actually understanding this proposal before working it into their partisan flame wars, I've written a synopsis of the 2012 Neuron white paper on my blog. I also shared some of my thoughts on the merits of the project.
Here's that blog posting: http://nucambiguous.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/bam-my-thoughts-on-big-bucks-for-big-brain-science/
Thanks for fixing my html fail.
DARPA and the homeland-military-intel community do not want to cure disease with this initiative. They want to CONTROL and neutralize human beings -- and they are using a cell tower scalar electromagnetic weapon system deployed everywhere to torture, impair, subjugate, neutralize, harm and slow kill Americans that ideologues and hate-mongers consider to be "dissidents" or "undesirables." THERE IS A NAZI-LIKE GESTAPO OPERATING IN THE U.S. AND IT IS BEING RUN OUT OF HOMELAND, MILITARY, INTELLIGENCE AND LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES/COMMANDS AND THEIR PRIME CONTRACTOR:
LOCKHEED MARTIN CYBER UNITS UNDER U.S. COMMAND SILENTLY TORTURE AMERICANS WITH CELL TOWER SCALAR ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPON SYSTEM (U.S. Patent 7629918, Raytheon): VETERAN MAINSTREAM JOURNALIST
GESTAPO USA: FED-POLICE FUSION CENTER VIGILANTE NETWORK PERSECUTES CITIZEN TARGETS
The links were disappeared from my comment above. Re-posting:
'LOCKHEED MARTIN CYBER UNITS UNDER U.S. COMMAND SILENTLY TORTURE AMERICANS WITH CELL TOWER SCALAR ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPON SYSTEM (U.S. Patent 7629918, Raytheon): VETERAN MAINSTREAM JOURNALIST
GESTAPO USA: FED-POLICE FUSION CENTER VIGILANTE NETWORK PERSECUTES CITIZEN TARGETS
The links I included in my comment above again have been disappeared. I got a message saying that because I am a "new user," there may be "content restrictions." I have been signed up to the NBC News website for at least two years. Re-posting, this time without live links:
LOCKHEED MARTIN CYBER UNITS UNDER U.S. COMMAND SILENTLY TORTURE AMERICANS WITH CELL TOWER SCALAR ELECTROMAGNETIC WEAPON SYSTEM (U.S. Patent 7629918, Raytheon): VETERAN MAINSTREAM JOURNALIST
viclivingston(dot)blogspot(dot)com/2011/12/u.html
GESTAPO USA: FED-POLICE FUSION CENTER VIGILANTE NETWORK PERSECUTES CITIZEN TARGETS
viclivingston(dot)blogspot(dot)com/2012/01/thugocracy-u.html
From a purely scientific point of view, this project seems amateurish in its conception. It seems to make the classic mistake of thinking a "snapshot" of the brain will reveal its organizing principles. Rather, it's the entire process history of the brain, its species evolution over 100s of millions of years, and the development history of each individual organism, in utero, and while richly connected to its environment over decades, that are needed to understand behavior in the instant. The neuronal action potential firing pattern is but one of dozens of informatic processes going on, so why pick this one subsystem (long-distance communication) as being revelatory of overall system function? Complex Informatic processes are going on at the sensory, motor, and endocrine interfaces. Since these are the input-output interfaces of the brain, there is a strong argument to start here with micro datastream analysis. After all, the brain's system function is to generate purposive behavior, constructing an internal world model as a means to predict sensory input states, extracting novelty from redundancy, and remembering experience gathered over lifespan. Input-output microstates are the starting point for study because everything else going on in the brain is about building and operating a purposive bridge between input and output.
The neuronal network is built on top of very sophisticated nano machines, the synapses. And the individual brain cell runs on internal cell machinery, involving gene expression, protein synthesis, and cell membrane interactions.
Quantum interactions are also suggested.
Let's learn from the Human Genome Project. It didn't work out as planned, where the gene sequences ALONE would explain a whole host of normal function and disease states. In retrospect, understanding gene expression as an ongoing, dynamic process is crucial to making hay out of a "snapshot" of the chromosomal DNA.
Scientists are making the same mistake to hype the "connectome" as the holy grail. Start by looking at the entire system, focussing on system purpose, and input-output streams of action.
It's OK, soon all of this will be irrelevant
ok soon it may be irrelevant anyway
just read articles in science.nbcnews.com regarding studies on the brain and add to that the fact that our humanity has yet to catch up to our technology
People who've heard the 90 For Life message, that is, 90 essential nutrients our bodies need to stay healthy, have reserve their ailments to include Alzheimer's, Dementia. Check the solutions page at my90nutirents.com to view health concerns related to essential fatty acid and cholesterol deficiences, and the Healthy Brain and Heart Pack to rectify. Dr. Wallach recommends people eat their eggs with the york soft and to use butter, but not margarine. To learn more about Dr. Wallach visit, my90forlife.com/397465 It bothers my spirit when I hear year after year millions of dollars are spent for this project and that project to always find the "cure" that already exits but no one gets excited to share it because the "cure" doesn't generate that constant flow of money.
Libs mapping your brain now I am in total fear.
Great. Using this, Obama could become Big Brother ala 1984. Perhaps that's what he has in mind since he's such a dictator