More than
180 neuroscientists have signed an open letter to the European Commission
calling on it to reconsider the technical goals and oversight of one of the
world’s largest brain-mapping projects, predicting it is likely to fail.
The
European Union agreed last year to invest more than one billion euros in the
Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year effort involving dozens of research
institutions to create a simulation of how the human brain works, using
supercomputers.
But according to a letter released by dissenting
scientists, the project is doomed by opaque management and the pursuit of goals
not widely shared by neuroscientists. “We believe the HBP is not a
well-conceived or implemented project and that it is ill suited to be the
centerpiece of European neuroscience,” the letter says.
Governments, including those of the United
States and China, have all launched large neuroscience projects to study the
brain (see “Brain Mapping”). But the brain is so massively complex—it has roughly
86 billion neurons and trillions of connections—that there’s little consensus
on how to study it.
Europe’s HBP has been particularly controversial
because it emphasizes large-scale mapping of the brain and computer simulations
over traditional, small-scale bench research. The project’s core goal,
according to its website, is “to build a completely new information computing technology infrastructure for
neuroscience.”
Signers of the letter, including neuroscientists
from the University of Oxford and the Institut Pasteur, intend to boycott 50
million euros per year of neuroscience research grants that have been linked to
the EU project.
“Why should an information technology project
determine neuroscience funding?” says Zachary Mainen, a researcher at the
Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal, which gathered the signatures
after a component of the project it was involved with was cancelled. “It’s not
a project that was planned by the neuroscience community. They say they are
going to simulate the brain, but I don’t think anyone believes that.”
According to a report in the Guardian, the
neuroscientists hope to influence a review of the project by
European officials that is expected to be complete by the end of the summer.
The HBP is led by Henry Markram, a
neuroscientist at the the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in
Switzerland, who says critics are upset because there’s a scientific “paradigm
shift” under way that threatens their way of working.
“It’s a natural reaction when you move from an
old paradigm to a new one. It happened with the Human Genome Project,” says
Markram. “That was also about large-scale, systematic teams working together,
and you also had the individual labs saying ‘Oh my, I am going to be out of
business.’ It’s very similar to that.”
Within two years, Markram says, the HBP will
release the first phase of its technology platform, which will let any
scientist contribute data and run simulations. He says this will bring
neuroscience up to speed with disciplines like astrophysics or climate
research, where scientists use simulations all the time. “You can’t measure
everything in the Universe, but you can simulate it,” he says. “You can’t
measure all of the brain, either, so we are going to have to predict a lot of
it.”
That focus on computer simulations is what’s
generating the most withering criticism. Konrad Kording, a neuroscientist at
Northwestern University, calls the European project “useless and misleading”
and says there is “genuine concern that the neuroscience community in Europe
will be damaged by a very high-profile project that is deeply misguided.” Continue
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