It is unprecedented to see a wide
range of neuroscientists including young ones and established scientists,
coming together to raise voice against the way the EU flagship: Human BrainProject is governed and potentially misrepresenting the efforts of the European
neuroscience community.
The criticism is not new
It was in 2005 that the Blue Brain Project
was announced and it was proclaimed that the project would bring a ‘quantum leap in the level of detail at which the
brain can be modelled’ [Markram Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 2006]. That time itself
there was doubt in the scientific community about the success of the project.
The opinions of highly respected neuroscientists ranged from saying that ‘even if it worked we would not understand
how it worked’ to outright rejection of this idea by saying ‘it is their time and money, if they want to
waste it so be it’.
Such doubts and
rejections were based on years of experience in theory and modeling of neuronal
systems. And indeed they were right, after eight years of the initiation of the
Blue Brain Project, we have not seen any paradigm shift in the way neuronal
systems are modeled and studied. As such
the expectation of a ‘quantum leap’ was absurd because there is nothing that
can be called a ‘quantum leap’. Anyways, we are still waiting to see that one
landmark paper from the Blue Brain Project describing the activity of a
neocortical column of a mouse, let alone explaining the dynamical properties
and role of various parameters.
Perhaps the motivation for
creating a large-scale detailed simulation of brain to understand is rooted in
a famous quote of Richard Feynman ‘What I cannot create, I do not understand’.
The problem
At the outset, copying a system is not ‘creating’. Moreover, we can be
continuously ‘creating’ things without being aware of the mechanisms
explicitly, think of language and teaching your kids. Brains are being created
at a rather alarming rate (think of the human population), yet we have no clue
how to ‘make’ it. Nevertheless, the blue brain project despite being a big
overall failure was matured in to a flagship project – Human Brain Project,
despite much criticism.
Systems and theoretical neuroscience is in its infancy (perhaps in the
pre-Galalian era) and
there is no consensus on approaches, methods and tools to start to understand
the brain function. In fact, key questions have not precipitated yet and there
is no notion what would the solution of a problem look like. The book ’23
problems in neuroscience’ is only a beginning of a beginning, if at all. Neuroscience
presently is a melting pot where ideas and tools from practically every
scientific discipline are brought in to ‘understand’ the dynamics, information
processing and function of neuronal systems.
Human brain project is not same as human genome project or other such projects
In this sense the comparison of
human brain project (and also of its cousin the Brain project) with the human
genome project or the Apollo program of NASA or the Manhattan project. The big
difference is that for all these previously successful large-scale
collaborative projects the theory was all understood and we exactly knew what
we wanted to do. Neuroscience is decades away from that state.
The human brain project was not the solution to start with
In such a state of a Neuroscience,
it is highly risky and shortsighted to devote a huge amount of resources to
just one approach, no matter how organized and well thought. At this stage we need an environment that
fosters exploratory and/or hypothesis driven research. We all understand
the urgency to understand brain and its function but we should also be prepared to accept its complexity and that solution
and answers may not come easily and rapidly. That is, we should not raise
undue expectations in the public eye.
The human brain project falls short
on both the criteria (its neither exploratory nor hypothesis driven) and many more. As we have just learned from those who were
once part of the HBP, the project is pushing for a specific line of research and
that is why becomes way too exclusive. Such an attitude can only hurt the
progress in neuroscience, especially when the funds are limited.
Right at the onset of this project,
which essentially is an extension of the ‘failed’ Blue Brain Project, serious
doubts were raised. But those were quickly dismissed on account of being left
out the initial HBP team. A large fraction of theoreticians backed out at one
occasion, when they had a disagreement on the concepts and approaches with the
current leadership of the project. However, now when people who were part of
the HBP are removed from the project we get an inside view of how HBP is being
governed.
Ideally the response at the first emergence of the disagreement should have been to propose another competing project. But as I said neuroscience is not in such a state as a discipline, and indeed non-HBP group of scientists correctly did not opt for yet another singular approach.
A possible way forward
Now that HBP project is running and
a more organized criticism (from both outside and formerly inside scientists)
is building up it is time to re-evaluate the project. It would be a big shame
to abandon the project and in fact, I am sure not if this is even feasible. This criticism has come either too late (community should have responded before the project was funded) or too early (the project is just a year old now).
Perhaps now a better strategy would be to
transform the HBP in to a funding agency along the lines of National Institute
of Health (NIH) in the US or the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) and use
the currently assigned funding to support more independent and/or small
collaborative projects. The leadership of this ‘funding agency’ is given to
some less controversial set of scientists. The European Institute of
Neuroscience could become a platform to establish collaborations and support
further interactions in terms of focused workshops.
