Obama’s BRAIN: Making It Up as They Go Along

Today’s issue of Nature has an article by Helen Shen recounting the tempestuous and confused story of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative. Coming after the administration’s botched launch of healthcare.gov, one is left in awe at the hubris of a government managed mega-research project that aims to simultaneously record all of the neural activity in the human brain, and that will involve scientific and budgetary coordination between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Kavli Foundation, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.

As they say in the White House briefing room, expect a few glitches as things roll out.

Here’s a quick recap for those of you keeping score at home:

The White House, “on the lookout for a bold presidential initiative,” latched onto a blue-sky idea called the Brain Activity Map (BAM) which had been floated a few months earlier. The president mentioned it in his State of the Union speech on February 12, and the administration was soon talking about a ten-year, $3.8 billion plan. Many neuroscientists were “alarmed,” fearing that the money would be pulled from existing research programs, and that failure of such a titanic project might “undermine public trust in science.” One scientific critic called it “a very narrow agenda of a small group of people.”

The White House formally announced its plan on April 2, by which time BAM had been transformed by clever acronym into the BRAIN Initiative. Unlike BAM, Obama’s BRAIN had “no clearly defined goal” and many neuroscientists found it “puzzlingly vague” and yet “reassuring,” because details were to be left to DARPA, NIH, NSF and the four private foundations.

The hashing out of details took place at a meeting in Arlington, Virginia on May 6. Chen described that meeting as “a frenetic pitch-fest,” and a “cacophonous town hall meeting” filled with “restless attendees,” all lobbying for their particular scientific topics and techniques.

To the growing exasperation of audience members, however, there was no convergence towards a coherent agenda for the [BRAIN] initiative.

The boisterous open session was followed by a carefully stage-managed closed meeting at which the specially selected NIH advisory committee (a.k.a. “The Dream Team,” chaired by Rockefeller’s Cornelia Bargmann and Stanford’s William Newsome) heard privately from invited speakers. The Dream Team’s selection of speakers and topics drew fire from scientists who felt excluded.

After the meeting in Alexandria, the government research agencies began playing “after you, Alphonse,” with NSF and DARPA ultimately declining to take the lead in BRAIN planning. So all eyes were on the NIH advisory committee, which on September 16 made public its interim report on the project’s scientific priorities. The result will not surprise anyone who has served on a committee.

Many had feared that it would fail to be sufficiently inclusive, but the document was instead so staggeringly broad that it seemed to encompass all of circuit-based neuroscience.

The NIH advisory committee has now kicked the can down the road to an open comment session at the massive Society for Neuroscience meeting on November 11 in San Diego.

Having squeezed its fifteen minutes of attention out of the president’s SOTU speech, the Obama White House has “so far indicated no intention to coordinate the [inter-agency planning] process more formally.” Whether that is a bug or a feature has yet to be determined.

Chen’s detailed account of the BRAIN Initiative is remarkable—it brims with fear, anxiety, chaos, distraction, mistrust and lack of coordination. Welcome to Big Science in the Age of Obama. When we load every dream and wish onto the agenda of the Federal government, can we be surprised that the behemoth staggers and fails us? Are we shocked to find the Federal money trough swarmed by a selfish, unruly throng, and the spigot controlled by a small coterie of insiders? If you are, you haven’t been paying attention for the past five years.

Society for Neuroscience President: “Shut Up,” He Explained

With over 42,000 members the Society for Neuroscience is the largest scientific association in the field. Its president, Larry Swanson, sent an email to members today discussing President Obama’s brain research initiative. It is a remarkable document. I reprint it in full below (emphases mine).

Swanson makes two points: SfN members should support the plan because money, and they should keep any misgivings about it to themselves because money.

This disgraceful note is what passes for science advocacy today.

Dear fellow Society for Neuroscience members,

Following a week of extraordinary attention to the field of neuroscience and support for biomedical research, I write to share the SfN Executive Committee’s view about President Obama’s announcement of a U.S. brain research initiative and why we believe it is important for the neuroscience community to both embrace and help shape it through scientific dialogue. I had the privilege of attending the President’s announcement at the White House, and, after listening to his words, I am excited and confident that this and other emerging global funding initiatives can be tremendously positive for our field.

The announcement comes at a critical time in neuroscience. Unparalleled scientific progress and possibility co-exist alongside growing challenges caused by shrinking or flat national government budgets for science research. Precisely because of these realities, the Executive Committee believes the President’s announcement represents a critical moment to both pursue scientific opportunities and make the case that now is the time to increase science investment. Last Tuesday’s White House announcement prioritized an initial investment in pilot tools and technologies. We think this is a reasonable place to start as it acknowledges the long horizons and deep challenges inherent in studying the brain, as well as the advantages of developing revolutionary new methods for discovery. The project also has established a rigorous process for determining investments and future planning, with an exemplary NIH Advisory Committee comprised of distinguished scientists from across our field with a strong emphasis on basic science.

While we should all continue to explore and discuss questions about the scientific direction, it is important that our community be perceived as positive about the incredible opportunity represented in the President’s announcement. If we are perceived as unreasonably negative or critical about initial details, we risk smothering the initiative before it gets started.

At the same time, SfN knows that scientists will be challenged to make progress on even these initial projects — let alone pursue the field’s ongoing vital work — without sustained and growing financial investment in the scientific enterprise. The President articulated the outlines of a possible long-term vision for focusing on brain research, with an emphasis on basic science, and NIH Director Francis Collins has consistently emphasized that the initiative likely requires a project spanning a decade or more and strong NIH-wide funding. His comparisons of the project to the Human Genome Project, while not a perfect scientific analogy, suggests to the public a long-term commitment. To help realize these possibilities, SfN will continue advocating strongly for sustained investments to support neuroscience and the biomedical research enterprise overall, and we will need all of your voices in those efforts for years to come.

SfN encourages healthy debate and rigorous dialogue about the effort’s scientific directions. Testing of assumptions, methodological debate, and constructive competition are central to scientific progress. I urge you to bring all this to the table through our scientific communications channels and venues, including the SfN annual meeting in San Diego this fall and The Journal of Neuroscience.

Thanks to your extraordinary scientific achievements, the neuroscience field is capturing the world’s attention, and, here in the United States, rallying a nation to support more focus on scientific discovery. Thank you for your commitment to advancing science and improving health. I look forward to participating with all of you in this ongoing discussion as the initiative takes shape.

Sincerely,
Larry Swanson
SfN President

This message shows that Swanson is clearly in damage control mode. Obama's BRAIN proposal has been criticized by many scientists and Swanson wants to suppress open dissent so as not to jeopardize SfN's rent seeking activities.

Exit question: Can you find the part where Swanson describes the actual neuroscience that $100 million in tax money will buy?

Bonus question: What is the scientific term for “trust us”? (Answer: “an exemplary NIH Advisory Committee comprised of distinguished scientists.”)

Bonus question 2: What is the scientific term for “don’t air your disagreement in public”? (Answer: “bring all this to the table through our scientific communications channels and venues.”)

Obama’s Incoherent BRAIN

We have a good understanding of the sense of smell at the biological periphery. We know how odor receptors work and how the sensory information they convey is organized in the nose and olfactory bulb. Beyond that, however, things get murky. We know the higher brain areas of olfaction only in broad brush strokes. We have barely an inkling how odor intensity and pleasantness are modulated by brain areas dealing with memory and emotion. Wouldn’t it be great to have it all mapped out, from the physical molecule of trimethylamine to the behavioral yuck response?

That is the allure of President Obama’s $100 million brain research initiative. But it isn’t easy to get a handle on what exactly the project consists of.

Susan Young’s piece yesterday on the MIT Technology Review website is subtitled “Obama calls for $100 million to develop new technologies to understand the brain.” She makes it sound like a technology development initiative.

But today’s WSJ op-ed by Paul Allen and Francis Collins calls it “a federally coordinated effort to unlock the secrets of the brain,” to “gain powerful insights into neurological diseases and mental-health disorders.” That sounds like basic research, not technology development. So which is it?

Allen and Collins note that neuroscientists have a host of research techniques at their disposal. They observe that we can study small, isolated neural circuits but we don’t yet understand how the brain works as a whole. To understand “this piece of highly excitable matter” we need a massively scaled up effort, broadened to include “a range of disciplines, from physics and biology to nanoscience, computer science and engineering.” Or, as Allen and Collins say, “All hands must be on deck.”

But here’s what Young sees: “The BRAIN initiative proposes to develop new technologies that can record the activity from thousands, if not millions or billions, of neurons simultaneously at timescales matching behavior and mental activities.” Among the new technologies she lists are nanochips, nano particles, nanoprobes with wireless data transfer, novel optical techniques, voltage-sensitive fluorescent molecules, synthetic biology, improved calcium-imaging methods and enzymes that build ion concentration-sensitive errors into DNA.

So would new techniques get us closer to the Big Picture in odor perception? Perhaps. But it’s not as if we’re hurting for technology. Among the techniques used to study smell are calcium imaging, single cell recording, patch clamp recording, cell ensemble recording, fluorescent imaging of gene expression, optical tracing of trans-synaptic connections, autoradiography, fMRI, EEG, recording of chemosensory evoked potentials, magnetoencephalography, transgenic expression of receptors (a.k.a. “synthetic biology”), genomics, and computer modeling of receptor activation. There is no one path to understanding the Secret of Odor Perception—it is being attacked with a diverse arsenal of technology by a lot of really smart people focused obsessively on smell.

The BRAIN project, in contrast, sounds like a plan invented by the Underpants Gnomes: (1) create technology, (2) ?, (3) unlock the secrets of the brain. Like the Underpants Gnomes, BRAIN fans are adamant about wanting one thing: more. More technology, more researchers, more money. More underpants.

To be fair, Allen and Collins say “progress will also hinge on the cooperation of the public and private sectors, a welcome aspect of the president’s “BRAIN” initiative. We’ll need creative, nimble management to ensure the best work out of both sides.” It’s a bit ironic to hear Francis Collins call for nimble management. He led the federal government’s enormous Human Genome Project which, you’ll remember, was nearly beaten to its goal by Celera Genomics, J. Craig Venter’s private company which started later but moved faster.

Obama’s Brain Activity Map: Making the Connections

In his SOTU speech, President Obama issued a vague call for more investment (i.e., spending of taxpayer dollars) in “mapping the human brain.” Five days later, the New York Times supplied more details: the project, a comprehensive map of human brain activity, will be on the scale of the Human Genome Project which cost $3.8 billion dollars over thirteen years.

(The undertaking is already being referred to as “Obama’s Brain Project.” Funny isn’t it that we never talk about “George H.W. Bush’s Human Genome Project”?)

Science bloggers have been buzzing and tweeting about this for days. Some question the rationale: is the science ripe enough? are the objectives clear? Others question the priorities: should we place a massive bet on brain mapping when only a tiny fraction of individual neuroscience grant proposals are being funded by NIH?

Perhaps they all miss the point.

It took years of support from DOE and several major scientific confabs before the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990. In contrast, the idea of a brain activity map was first raised last June in a paper in Neuron and now it’s national priority. Extraordinary! Until you think about how things work in the Age of Obama. It’s all about who has the most juice.

Consider:

Top contributors to Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign (source: Center for Responsive Politics):




Affiliations of the six authors of the Neuron paper:

University of California (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab):
University of California (UCSD)
University of California (Kavli Institute, UCSD)
Harvard Medical School
Columbia University
Cal Tech

And from the NYT:

A meeting held on Jan. 17 at the California Institute of Technology was attended by the three government agencies, as well as neuroscientists, nanoscientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm. According to a summary of the meeting, it was held to determine whether computing facilities existed to capture and analyze the vast amounts of data that would come from the project.

So there you go! Obama’s Brain Activity Mapping Project is on a fast track—no peer review, only a single planning meeting held a month before the announcement—and key players include five of his eight biggest campaign donors. This is a top-down, big government initiative of the sort we have become very familiar with in the Age of Obama.

Exit question: Will Brain Activity Mapping be to Big Neuroscience what Solyndra was to Green Energy?