NEUROSCIENCE. The era of big neuroscience has arrived with the launch of the President Obamas BRAIN Initiative, Japan’s Brain/MINDS, Europe’s Human Brain Project and others. But what has propelled neuroscience to the vanguard? What impact will these initiatives have on the field? And how will they change our understanding of the brain? There is a revolution occurring in experimental neuroscience,” said neuroscientist Bill Newsome, co-chair of the National Institute’s of Health working group on the BRAIN Initiative, in a roundtable discussion last week with The Kavli Foundation. 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. That technological revolution has allowed Japanese scientists to create transgenic marmosets. Although the brains of these small, New World monkeys weigh just eight grams, marmosets have a well-developed frontal lobe and sophisticated social behaviors, making them an ideal experimental model for brain researchers. And they are at the center of Japan’s new brain-mapping project, Brain/MINDS. We believe research on nonhuman primates is essential for understand the human brain and for developing knowledge-based strategy for diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders,” said neuroscientist Hideyuki Okano, one of two leaders of Brain/MINDS. To meet the ambitious goals of these three initiatives, however, neuroscience must undergo a culture change, said Sean Hill, co-director of neuroinformatics on the Human Brain Project. I hope that what [these three initiatives] do is promote sharing, collaboration and reusability of data to turn neuroscience into a cooperative endeavor…. 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.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 22:00:00 +0000
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