by ALISON ABBOTT
PHOTO/ Juan Gartner Getty Images
Modelled on big physics projects, International Brain Lab will bring together pre-eminent neuroscientists to probe a single behavior
Leading neuroscientists are joining forces to study the brain—in much the same way that physicists team up in mega-projects to hunt for new particles.
The International Brain Lab (IBL), launched on September 19, combines 21 of the foremost neuroscience laboratories in the United States and Europe into a giant collaboration that will develop theories of how the brain works by focusing on a single behaviour shared by all animals: foraging. The Wellcome Trust in London, and the Simons Foundation in Washington DC have together committed more than US$13 million over five years to kick-start the IBL.
The pilot effort is an attempt to shake up cellular neuroscience, conventionally done by individual labs studying the role of a limited number of brain circuits during simple behaviours. The ‘virtual’ IBL lab will instead ask how a mouse brain, in its entirety, generates complex behaviours in constantly changing environments that mirror natural conditions.
The project will use chips that can record the electrical signals of thousands of neurons at once. It will also use other emerging technologies, such as optogenetics toolkits that control neurons with light. “It’s a new approach that will likely yield important new insights into brain and behaviour,” says Tobias Bonhoeffer, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, who is also a Wellcome Trust governing-board member.
Large-scale neuroscience projects are hardly rare. In 2013, the European Commission announced the 10-year Human Brain Project, which will cost more than €1 billion ($1.1 billion); and in 2014, US president Barack Obama launched the US Brain Initiative to develop neuro-technologies, with $110 million of funding that year. The Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, Washington, has been creating comprehensive maps of brain anatomy and neural circuitry since 2003. Japan, China, Canada and other countries also have, or are planning, their own big neuroscience initiatives.
But none operates quite like the IBL, which will be governed in a similar way to large-scale physics projects such as ATLAS and CMS, at Europe’s particle-physics lab CERN, which reported evidence for the Higgs boson in 2012. The two collaborations, at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, brought together experimentalists and theoreticians from hundreds of labs worldwide to test the predictions of particle physics’ standard model.
Like the massive CERN teams, the IBL has created a flat hierarchy and a collaborative decision-making process with near-daily web meetings. Instead of acting only when group consensus is reached, teams will make decisions by simple consent. “No one will be able to stop a proposed experiment being carried out without a very convincing proposal of why it would be a disaster,” says Alexandre Pouget, an IBL member and a theoretician at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.
Scientific American for more