Neuroscientist William Newsome of Stanford University is one of two scientists tapped by President Obama to lead a new brain research initiative, which the administration hopes to launch with $100 million of public funding and a similar amount from several private foundations. This morning Newsome talked with Wired about what the project can (and can't) accomplish and how he hopes to influence it.
Wired: Why do we need this?
William Newsome: Here's the way I see it. The federal government spends several billion dollars a year on brain research already. That's given us this great base of basic knowledge about the brain. But we have the potential now to do something much, much greater because of the new tools that are coming on line, because of new optical imaging tools and parallel electrode arrays that let us look at the collective actions of thousands or even tens of thousands of neurons at a time. That creates whole new possibilities.
I think we're at a unique point in the history of neuroscience. We have a chance to take our basic investment and amplify it many times over if we can get the right technology development people hooked up with the right neuroscientists.
Wired: Will there be new money for this research or will money be taken from other research projects?
__Newsome: __It's a tough question, especially for a person like me who sits outside the government. I'm hoping that it's new money for neuroscience. The critical thing for me is that the $40 million [contribution from the National Institutes of Health] come out of the director's funds or hopefully even new money that the President and Congress agree to appropriate, and that it not come out of R01s [the bread and butter grants that fund most biomedical research labs]. It's going to do absolutely no good to develop tools for a new generation of neuroscientists if we in the process seriously damage that same generation of scientists.
Wired: What will this look like once it gets off the ground?
__Newsome: __It will not be a big centralized thing, I'm very confident of that. Now it does seem conceivable to me that in a few years if we realize there are two or three things that are exceptionally promising that require teams of 40 or 50 people, we might see two or three research centers emerge. But otherwise it won't look that different from what we have now, except that we will probably have specific grants directed at developing particular technologies. The idea is to get small teams of engineers and physicists and chemists and neuroscientists to work together.
Wired: Aside from the money issue, what other concerns are you hearing from your scientific colleagues?
__Newsome: __From scientists, the big worry is that you're going to throw a bunch of money at technology and the technology is never going to be used, that what we should be funding is hard core neuroscience. That's probably the biggest criticism. Another criticism is that this whole business of recording every neuron in the brain of some animal has this moonshot quality to it, but it's not well thought out. You don't actually need to record from every neuron because so many are redundant, what you really need is strategic sampling at different points in the brain.
__Wired: __What can you learn from recording from lots of neurons that you can't learn from molecular methods or human brain scans?
Newsome: The great questions about how behavior and cognition emerge from the nervous system are not going to be answered at the molecular level. They're going to be answered by looking at how systems of neurons are engaging in coordinated activity and coordinated computation. Our ultimate goal is to understand how the mental states that we experience every moment of our waking lives are related to brain states.
fMRI is a great tool. I like the analogy that other people have used, that it's like looking down at the US from a satellite seeing the grid of lights at night. You can infer certain things: Here's a city, here's a city. But to really understand the interactions between those cities you need to get down to the level of individual people moving around in cars. It's a matter of scale and resolution.
Wired: Are you worried that the potential benefits to human health are being oversold?
Newsome: Of course it's a concern. If it's oversold, at the end of ten years the credibility of the whole field will be destroyed. Obama said it right yesterday that this is a challenge for the 21st century. He didn't say decade, he said century. What I firmly believe is that to get at those diseases and understand what goes wrong we have to go through the steps we're going through now. We have to get in and learn the basic biology. The sooner we do that, the sooner we're going to solve disease.
