Braincluster
Serious brain research has been made a horror story
We publish the material of the MK journalist Natalia Vedeneeva "Revealed the underside of the program of "chipping Russians": a serious study of the brain was made a horror story. Scientists have not received funding because of the information stuffing?"
"Russians are going to implant chips in their brains!" Yesterday's headlines of news agencies shouted with reference to the Ministry of Education and Science. The news scared everyone. "Well, it's started!" a neighbor who believes in the conspiracy theory told me. A little more, and many would believe that someone's brains were swimming from the harsh Moscow heat.
Apparently, in order to extinguish the noise, in the highest echelons of power, a sedative pill was lowered to the "ground": "The Russian government did not allocate money for brain chipping." The answer turned out to be very popular, it shows concern for ordinary people... Only now there was an annoying mistake. The research program in question is called "Brain, Health, Intelligence, Innovation". It was proposed by the Russian Academy of Sciences and Lomonosov Moscow State University, agreed in March this year by President Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Mishustin, and it has nothing to do with brain chipping. The program is very necessary for people, because it will make a step forward in the treatment of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, will help to understand the mechanisms of memory, consciousness. But it got bogged down precisely because of the raised "hype" about "brain chipping" in the press. There is a feeling that neither the president nor the Prime minister of the country has issued a decree to the relevant ministers. Here is the opinion of individual journalists who have not really delved into the essence of the matter – this is an authoritative opinion!
The program "Brain, health, intelligence, innovation" was designed until 2030, and it was supposed to allocate 54 billion rubles. Do not be alarmed, this is not so much, considering that the program is designed for 9 years and is "smeared" into several institutes.
Back in January last year, at a meeting of the Moscow State University Board of Trustees, its rector Viktor Sadovnichy and the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Alexander Sergeev, appealed to Putin with a request to support the brain research program, which in our country will not receive proper funding in any way. Taking into account that the topic of brain research is advanced all over the world today, given the enormous importance of clinical research on the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases of the century, Putin said: "Yes, prepare."
Scientists have prepared their part. It was big, I had to shorten it. The document was for a long time under the approval of Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova and finally in March of this year lay on the table of the president of the country, who signed it.
However, the strange thing is that even after that, no one allocated money for the program. As one of the participants, Pavel Balaban, scientific director of the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told us, the first tranche of it seems to have been scheduled for 2022. That is, one working year of the program has already been lost?
By the way, our neuroscientists are considered the best in the world, it is to us, according to Balaban, that the whole West goes to treat brain diseases. We would have had normal funding, and neither the Americans nor the Japanese would have caught up with us. Long-standing traditions, hereditary schools…
For example, at the last forum in St. Petersburg, the advanced development of the IVND RAS for completely blind people whose ocular nerve does not work was shown. Scientists have created a special electrode implanted in the brain, and thanks to it, a blind person has the opportunity to distinguish between light and shadow. There is a project on the optogenetic return of vision (for those who have a nerve preserved). According to Balaban, no one in the world has done this yet, our scientists are working with colleagues from other countries to develop these tools at the same level. For example, they need money to produce the implanted matrix itself.
The fundamental part of the program concerns the study of the problem of consciousness, which is handled by the Institute for Advanced Brain Research of Moscow State University under the leadership of Konstantin Anokhin. He is ahead of everyone in developing new methods for creating artificial intelligence based on a human neural network. The mathematicians are represented by the rector Viktor Sadovnichy himself.
And here is such an important program for everyone, it turns out, "pushed", zashelmed, reducing to a horror story about microchips in the brain?! "The federal research program, which was supposed to study the possibility of controlling external devices using microcomputers implanted in the brain, was closed last year because the Russian Government came to the conclusion that it was "impractical," the press service of the Ministry of Education and Science told RBC.
"How so? – scientists shrug their hands. – And the president, and the Prime Minister? Well, yes, experts admit, in the third point of the program there was a completely small part of the developments for the IT industry, like the interfaces described in scandalous articles to provide control of complex systems (airplanes, nuclear power plants, cars).
Probably, on the basis of this, dashing minds interested in the fantasy of the "Lawn Mower" type decided to "hype", to present serious developments as know-how dangerous to human freedom, which will end with nothing more than a rampant implantation of microchips into the brains of citizens.
"We don't even use the term "microchip" anywhere," explains Pavel Balaban. "And with the help of our electrodes implanted in the brain, it is certainly impossible to transmit any commands to the brain."
But the reality is that no one seems to care much about the opinion of scientists. Here is how the situation with the Brain, Health, Intelligence, Innovation program was commented to us by the scientific director of the expert-analytical center "Scientific and Educational Policy" Evgeny Szhenov: "Yes, the Brain, Health, Intelligence, Innovation program was supposed to be included in the national project "Science", later - "Science and Universities". But the project remained without movement after the "hype" raised in the media about "brain chipping". Logic – there should be no points in the national project that are ambiguously evaluated by the public. At the same time, Rosmolodezh and ANO "National Priorities" are currently collecting initiatives into national projects. So the return of this project to the current agenda is possible."
Do you understand? Rosmolodezh and the autonomous non–profit organization are, of course, serious organizations. But why do they determine the scientific agenda of the country? What do they have to do with it, when the opinion of academic scientists and researchers of the country's leading university is much more important in this matter?
Or maybe the "HYPE" is not accidental? Maybe because of the unwillingness to allocate six billion (!) a year for scientific research, the persons responsible for financing decided to play along with those who compose horror stories and let things go on the brakes? Just keep in mind that if artificial intelligence is created in a dozen years, and it will not be us, society will remember who today, in 2021, stubbornly pretended that he did not understand the true meaning of neurobiological research of the brain.
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