Go Big or Go Home
Problems with the BRAIN Initiative
Scientists and governments alike both get very excited about big, flashy projects. Two recent biological projects come to mind here: the Human Genome Project, and more recently the BRAIN Initiative.
Scientists, and indeed most people, are familiar with the Human Genome Project. But just in case your internet connection has been down for the past 24 years, here is a quick low down: the goal of the project was to map the entire human genome. All 3.2 billion bases of it. Through this they hoped to create personalized medicine, speed up cancer research, and many other treatments and cures as well.
Well, the big problem is that everyone has a different genome. Indeed, every cell in your body could potentially have a different genome, if only by a few base pairs due to small mutations. Looking for an “average” genome so to speak is not an easy task. Then there was the enormous cost. Sequencing even a small genome could be well over $10,000 when the project first started. As technology progressed, the cost did go down.
But it was not until commercial interests started to get involved that the project and the technology started to get a move on. Craig Venture’s company Celera Genomics, almost won the genomic race. The government’s project published an entire human genome just months before Celera. In all, it cost the government around $3 billion and took 11 years.
There have been good things to come from the Human Genome Project. Many orphan diseases were able to be studied and sequenced at a much lesser cost thanks to the data gathered. But we are no closer to personalized medicine, or even curing diseases because of it. We have all of this data, but we do not have the tools to use it.
Now the government is embarking on yet anther colossal task: the BRAIN Initiative. This massive project was officially started on April 2, 2013 with the goal of mapping the activity of every single neuron in the brain. The average brain has around 100 billion neurons alone. And that’s not even counting the glial cells that help the brain to function.
Similar to the Human Genome Project, the BRAIN Initiative is starting prematurely. We do not have the basic understanding necessary to guide this project. In essence, this project is a huge shot in the dark. The brain is not a simple electrical circuit. You cannot find out how it works by following the bouncing ball. They are not asking the right questions.
Generating all of this data will be just that, a bunch of data. Until we can get a more basic understanding of how the cells in the brain work for memory, movement, and everyday maintenance; this information will just be lying around somewhere. The cost for the project also just went up. To over $4 billion. There are better investments to make, and more informative questions to ask.
The brain is not a static thing. New connections can be formed and new neurons can be generated throughout our lifetime. Minimizing the astounding properties of what makes us individuals and human is a mistake. The research also does not take into account all of the stimuli that causes the neurons to fire. There are countless internal and external stimuli. It would be nearly impossible to record every neurons reaction to all of them.
Also, every brain comes with it’s own genome and environmental history. These things have a huge impact on the connections we form throughout our lifetimes and could be vastly different between individuals. If you control for these factors by limiting the environment, controlling the genome, and limiting the number of neurons being measured, then the project defeats itself. That will never be a true understanding of what is going on in an average brain of any species. Doing this would be like trying to understand the entire ocean, creatures, currents, and all, by observing the fish tank in your living room.
Supposing we record all English sentences spoken by someone, and then play that recording back. No one would say that the tape recorder knew English, even though it repeated the same performance. From a scientific perspective we want to know what the brain is capable of doing in principle, not what it actually does in a specific instance. In other words, we want to understand the laws of brain dynamics, not the details of brain dynamics. (Partha Mitra PhD, Scientific America)
Successful projects have a clear goal in mind. We have put a man on the moon, we have almost eradicated childhood diseases that used to kill millions, and yes we have mapped the entire human genome. This project might someday be very useful and informative, but just not yet.
