IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - 46
"In my mind, it's the
greatest challenge of our
time," says Miyoung Chun,
the Kavli Foundation's
vice president of science
programs. It was Chun
who, in late 2012, played
matchmaker between the
White House and a small
group of neuroscientists
who had big plans for
charting neurological
activity. From those
meetings grew the BRAIN
Initiative, which at its
inception focused narrowly
on developing new tools to
record electrical activity in
unprecedented numbers
of neurons, with the plan
to eventually turn those
recordings into maps of
human brain function.
With those maps,
scientists might come to
*honoraBle menTion*
JeT me
ouT oF here
at last, we'll have personal
vertical transportation
this year, half a century
after James Bond first
flew one, Martin Aircraft
Co., of Christchurch, New
Zealand, will begin selling
a jet pack, of sorts: It uses
not jets but rather a pair of ducted fans.
It can fly 30 kilometers and is tentatively
priced at US $250 000 (for armies) or
$150 000 (for emergency rescue services).
A consumer version will take a bit longer to
get regulators' approval. -PhiliP ross
know far more than they
do now about the brain's
biology, what happens
as people think and feel,
or when malfunction
becomes disease. They're
not the first researchers
to seek this knowledge, of
course, but the project's
proponents say we're at a
unique historical moment:
Our technological and
computational power may
finally be commensurate
with our questions.
"The human brain is a
miracle. It gives rise to
infinitely many thoughts,
emotions, memories, actions.
How can one biological
organ, a collection of cells,
do all that?" says Rockefeller
University neuroscientist
Cori Bargmann, cochair
of the NIH's advisory
committee. "No matter
how long you've been a
neuroscientist, it is still
amazing that this complexity
emerges from such mundane
biological components."
when PresIdent obama
first announced the BRAIN
Initiative, however, many
researchers were skeptical.
The current tools of human
brain analysis are indeed
coarse, they agreed,
incapable of recording
neurological activity at the
detail and scope they'd like.
But was large-scale, finegrained mapping realistic?
For instance, current stateof-the-art neurological
recording of zebra fish
involves some 80 000
neurons, and that requires
subjecting the creatures
to techniques that would
never be used on humans.
That's quite a few orders of
magnitude less challenging
than recording activity
from the 75 million neurons
of a mouse, to say nothing
of a human's roughly
86 billion neurons.
Even if technologies could
be developed to record all
that information, what could
you do with the results? It
would be an informational
deluge that would make
genomic big data look
puny. "Many people were
concerned that the project
was overambitious and
impractical," says Donald
Stein, a neurophysiologist at
Emory University, in Atlanta.
Following the scientific
outcry, the NIH, NSF, and
DARPA held a series of
workshops and meetings
with scores of scientists
to discuss what BRAIN
should be. While the project
will continue to evolve,
the research priorities
described in recent NSF
and NIH reports emphasize
basic science and tool
development that can lead
to grander map-making
projects as the years go on.
The report from the NIH
advisory committee doesn't
put the recording of cell
activity at the top of the
list. Rather, it starts with
a back-to-basics mandate.
The report calls for a
census of the brain's cell
types, which encompass
not only many varieties of
neurons but also glia, a longunderappreciated family
of cells that may actually
outnumber neurons. The
physical forms of these cells
icon by
Greg Mably
previous pages, top left: fia
formally announced the
federal project in April
2013 with a US $110 million
first-year budget that
will be parceled out to
the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), the National
Science Foundation (NSF),
and the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency
(DARPA). Four private
institutions-the Kavli
Foundation, Allen Institute
for Brain Science, Howard
Hughes Medical Institute,
and Salk Institute for
Biological Studies-have
also committed a total of
$122 million of their own
money to BRAIN work
in 2014. Over the next
year, the BRAIN Initiative
should coalesce into one
of the century's defining
scientific projects.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum January, 2014
IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - Cover1
IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - Cover2
IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - 1
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IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - Cover3
IEEE Spectrum January, 2014 - Cover4
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