Geography of the brain: details
The globe of the brain
Sofia Neskuchnaya, "Newspaper.Ru"
A project to create a complete map of brain activity will be launched in the USA, which will reveal the biological mechanisms of consciousness and the secrets of mental illness. The Brain Activity Map project will be the next large-scale stage of human cognition after the Human Genome Project, which mapped our genome.
The Obama administration plans to launch a ten-year large-scale scientific project to study the human brain. Its goal will be to build a full-fledged map of brain activity, just as the Human Genome Project built a map of the activity of human genes. The human genome research project was extremely successful: its results suggest that we will not be afraid of the most incurable diseases, and in the future we may be genetically calculating and designing a genome with the desired properties. One of the "fathers" of the project, whose work formed its basis, American biologist David Botstein, as it became known yesterday, became the winner of a new prize in medicine, established by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, as well as Facebook and Google founders Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin.
According to The New York Times (Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain), the project will be announced in March. State agencies, private foundations and teams of specialists in neurology and nanotechnology will be involved in its implementation. Together they will have to study the work of billions of brain neurons and uncover the secrets of the biological foundations of perception, work and, finally, consciousness.
Scientists pin great hopes on the project, including in the progress of studying Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, schizophrenia and autism, and the search for suitable therapy for mental disorders. Moreover, the results of the project can contribute to another area far from biology – the development of artificial intelligence.
The exact data on the planned spending is still unknown, but we are talking about billions of dollars, and a number of scientists and representatives of research organizations admitted to the newspaper that they participated in the development of the program, which will be called the Brain Activity Map project.
If the project is successful in science, it will be followed by a return for the economy. "The Human Genome Project cost about $300 million a year for 10 years. If we look at how much we currently spend on neuroscience and nanotechnology, I think the figure is already higher. Spending will not increase much, and the results can be impressive," says the famous molecular biologist from Harvard University, George Church, one of the fathers of synthetic biology. He helped in the planning of the genome project and now, according to him, also advises the creators of the Brain Activity Map project.
Other sources among the scientists involved in the planning claim that the cost of the project will exceed $ 300 million per year, that is, if approved by the US Congress, it will cost the budget at least $ 3 billion for a period of more than 10 years. The total cost of the Human Genome Project was $3.8 billion. It was started in 1990, and its goal – to create a complete map of the human genome – was achieved even earlier than planned, in April 2003.
According to the calculations of the federal government, the positive effect of the genome research project for the economy by 2010 reached $800 billion.
Of course, studies of brain nerve cells are already being conducted all over the world, but thought processes still remain one of the most misunderstood scientific mysteries. The brain consists of about 100 billion neurons, each of which "pierces" an electric current in response to external stimuli. In any – conscious or unconscious – brain activity, huge "collectives" of cells participate, and it is possible to understand their work only by studying them as a whole, and not one by one. But the brain is so complex that scientists have so far been able to comprehensively study only the work of only small groups of neurons, and in most cases this was done for samples of cells extracted from the body.
However, the Brain Activity Map project initiative has hopes for success: leading American experts claim that I will be able to analyze the brain as a whole. Six "flagships" of this field of science in June published an article in the journal Neuron (Alivisatos et al., The Brain Activity Map Project and the Challenge of Functional Connectomics, in open access), in which they outlined a number of possible approaches. Among them is the creation of a "fleet" of molecular machines that, without disturbing the structure of the brain, will be able to work in it as sensors, measuring activity at the cellular level. The machines are planned to be created on the basis of synthetic DNA. To implement the project, it will be necessary to create a network of "brain observatories" by analogy with astronomical observatories.
Supporters of the project refer to the experience of the Human Genome Project. "At the start in 1984, he also caused a lot of controversy: then he united several dozen scientists who were moving in this direction. We were working and didn't know that there were "crazy" people like us," Church recalls. Known for decades as the most talented biologist, he recently got on the pages of low-science publications. The newspaper Spiegel, perhaps due to the difficulties of translating from English into German, attributed to him the desire to clone a Neanderthal and the search for a "brave woman" for the role of a surrogate mother. Despite this unpleasant experience (Church had to make denials and justify himself), he apparently did not stop working with the press.
However, brain research also has a number of differences from the Human Genome Project. "The difference is that our new subject of research – the brain – is itself much more complex and confusing than the genome. It was very easy to define the goals of the genome research project. In this case, it is more difficult for us to answer the question of what is a map of brain activity and in general how things happen in it," says Ralph Greenspan, deputy director of the Institute of Brain and Consciousness at the University of California at San Diego and one of the authors of the article in Neuron, who also admitted that participates in the development of the project.
Funding will come from both the government and scientific grant funds, as well as private foundations that finance science. The US President will announce the amount in March as part of the budget plan, and it is unclear what funding will be approved in the current conditions of limited finances. However, Barack Obama is known as a supporter of the need for investment in science.
"Every dollar we spent on the human genome research project has returned $140 to our economy – every dollar," he said. – Today, our scientists are creating a brain map to understand the causes of Alzheimer's disease. They are developing drugs for the regeneration of damaged organs, creating materials that will increase the efficiency of batteries by 10 times. Now is not the time to gut investments in science and innovation."
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru21.02.2013