Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Why Some Scientists Aren't Happy About Obama's $3 Billion Brain Research Plan

From The Atlantic Wire, it seems some scientists are concerned about President Obama's desire to fund a 10-year mapping project of the human brain, at a cost of $3 billion. Some scientists believe the project "lacks clear goals" and "gobbles up money that could've gone to a lot more smaller studies."

Why Some Scientists Aren't Happy About Obama's $3 Billion Brain Research Plan
DAVID WAGNER
FEB 18, 2013


Funding-strapped researchers should be rejoicing at President Obama's promise to put $3 billion towards mapping the human brain, right? Not according to scientists who say the project lacks clear goals and gobbles up money that could've gone to a lot more smaller studies.

 The front page of Monday's New York Times carried a story by John Markoff on a research effort called the Brain Activity Map, a huge neuroscience undertaking that the Obama administration plans to invest $300 million in annually for the next decade. A joint project between federal agencies, private research foundations, and leading neuroscientists, the envisioned project would create a definitive map of interaction between the human brain's approximately 100 billion neurons. Advocates say the findings could improve our understanding of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, lead to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and boost the economy. The President is expected to announce the Office of Science and Technology Policy initiative as early as March, making good on a segment from his State of the Union that teased a brain research program on the scale of the Human Genome Project:
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 ... Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.
Harvard biologist George M. Church — who participated in the Human Genome Project and has been tapped to work on the Brain Activity Map — thinks this project could be even more profitable, saying it "will probably get a lot more bang for the buck."

 With sequestration hovering over research like a blunt guillotine, you might expect scientists to be on board with Church and Obama, supporting such huge allocations. And you'd be right to think that plenty of themare cheering the windfall. But a cadre of researchers remain skeptical about this second "Decade of the Brain," expressing concern about the feasibility of the Brain Activity Map's goals and wondering whether this is the best use of federal resources. Let's look at a few of their objections.

Too Many Eggs in One Basket




The Human Genome Project may have been a major success for man-on-the-moon level research projects, accomplishing its goals ahead of schedule and paying off the federal government's investment in spades. But the track record for similarly scaled research efforts is far from spotless. In fact, following his involvement in the huge "junk" DNA research project ENCODE, UC Berkeley biologist Michael Eisenargued against such "Big Science"  projects. "The lesson I learned from ENCODE is that projects like ENCODE are not a good idea," he wrote on his personal blog. "I think it is now clear that big biology is not a boon for individual discovery-driven science. Ironically, and tragically, it is emerging as the greatest threat to its continued existence."

The Feds Should Diversify Their Research Investments



Related to the first objection, this complaint holds that scientific discoveries are more often cobbled together piecemeal from many small studies than from billion-dollar research projects. And while it's great to see Church and his Brain Activity Map co-researchers secure such enormous funding, the rest of the research community will still be screwed if sequestration goes into effect next month. While the Obama administration puts together the Brain Activity Map funding package, university research leaders arewarning Congress that automatic budget cuts threaten to ax "the discovery and innovation that fuels the economy."

It's Unclear What We Could Find With a Brain Activity Map




Even in the post-Jonah Lehrer science writing landscape, neuroscience remains one of the hottest areas of inquiry. Pop-sci junkies just can't get enough when it comes to colorful fMRI scans, insights into different brain region functions, and the mind-altering effects of various neurotransmitters. But the fact is that neuroscientists still know very little about the brain. UC San Diego professor Ralph J. Greenspan, one of the Brain Activity Map researchers, admits as much in the New York Times article, saying, "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?" When the National Institutes of Health funded a substantial brain research effort called the Human Connectome Project last year, Nature's Jon Bardin reported:
Many wonder whether the NIH is making a mistake. Researchers have yet to prove that MRI techniques can produce a reliable picture of normal connectivity, never mind the types of abnormal connection likely to be found in brain disorders, and some researchers argue that the techniques have not been adequately validated. “I would do the basic neuroscience before I started running lots of people through MRI scanners,” says David Kleinfeld, a physics and neurobiology researcher at the University of California, San Diego.
Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at dwagner@theatlantic.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. 

  
Posted by at Wednesday, February 27, 2013
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1 comment:

Andy Smith said...

This pushback is very predictable. There has long been a conflict between scientists who support big projects that apply well-established technology to obtain some form of basic information, and those who want to stimulate bolder and less predictable approaches. There were similar voices raised against the human genome project, and as Greenspan notes, sequencing the human genome was a much clearer goal than determining connections among human brain neurons. To begin with, DNA sequences are fixed, and binary, i.e., one nucleotide either is or is not adjacent to another; neural connections are often plastic, and the strength of connection between any two neurons is variable. Not to mention that the number of connections among human brain neurons is orders of magnitude larger than the number of nucleotides in the human genome, and the methods for determining them orders of magnitude more difficult. Beyond the differences in difficulty of pursuing these projects, there are huge differences in the difficulty of using the information obtained. The genomic sequence told us immediately what genes were present, and how individuals differ with respect to variations of these genes (polymorphisms). A detailed understanding of neural connections does not necessarily tell us anything new. Not to say that it won't eventually, but we need to understand the brain further before we can even make use of such knowledge. In fact, we do know that brain functions arise from large networks of activity, and it is not at all clear that the detailed connections among all neurons in such networks is necessary to understanding how these networks function.

As a neuroscientist, my two cents is this project should receive some funding, but not $3 billion. I think we need to begin mapping, but since we still don't know exactly what we will do with the results, I don't see any big hurry. Other studies will help us answer the question of what to do with our knowledge of connections.

February 28, 2013 at 12:51 AM

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