Possibly
Understanding brain function requires the integration of information from the level of the gene to the level of behavior. At each of these many and diverse levels there has been an explosion of information, with a concomitant specialization of scientists. The price of this progress and specialization is that it is becoming virtually impossible for any individual researcher to maintain an integrated view of the brain and to relate his or her narrow findings to this whole cloth. Although the amount of information to be integrated far exceeds human limitations, solutions to this problem are available from the advanced technologies of computer and information sciences.
On April 2, 1993, the Human Brain Project was announced and published in the NIH Guide, grant applications for Phase I feasibility studies were solicited, and some 50 investigators are now supported. The Program Announcement was revised and reissued on October 6, 1995; research grant applications continue to be solicited. The Human Brain Project is a broad-based long-term research initiative which supports research and development of advanced technologies to open information superhighways to neuroscientists and behavioral scientists by providing an array of information tools for the 21st Century. These include databases of, and querying tools for, the full range of information about the brain and behavior, as well as technologies for such information to be managed, integrated and shared over networks. The network tools will provide channels of communication and collaboration between geographically distant sites.
The Human Brain Project evolved from the concept of a National Neural Circuitry Database; the idea of developing such a national resource was evaluated by a committee empaneled by the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine. A summary of that evaluation, which spanned two years and included consultation with about 150 scientists, was published in the summer of 1991 by the National Academy Press as a book entitled Mapping the Brain and its Functions: Integrating Enabling Technologies into Neuroscience Research. The report recommended that this initiative, now called the Human Brain Project, be implemented.
Because the scope of the Human Brain Project extends to all facets of brain and behavioral research and includes a range of technology sciences, this initiative is sponsored, in a coordinated fashion, by sixteen federal organizations across five federal agencies: the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Aging, National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Library of Medicine, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Dental Research, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Fogarty International Center, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the National Cancer Institute), the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense (Office of Naval Research), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Energy. Representatives from all of these organizations comprise the Federal Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Human Brain Project.
In the long term, the Human Brain Project will provide more than just a sophisticated array of information technologies to help scientists understand how various aspects of brain function fit together. It will also make available to researchers powerful models of neural functions, and facilitate hypothesis formulation and electronic collaboration. The technologies and standards which are developed as part of the Human Brain Project will serve as models for other scientific information tools. The Human Brain Project will, therefore, have impact far beyond the community of brain and behavioral researchers, and this impact will be felt long after the end of the Decade of the Brain.
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