If you want to make a neuroscientist scoff, mention the billion-dollar-plus Human Brain Project. More or less Europe’s version of President Obama’s Brain Initiative, it likewise seeks to decipher the network of neurons inside our skulls, but using an entirely different approach: by creating a computer simulation of the brain.
Even before it began, the project was ridiculed by those in the know. Words like “hooey” and “crazy” were thrown around, along with less family-friendly terms. Last July nearly 800 scientists signed a letter arguing, in so many words, that the project was a slow-motion train wreck that should either be overhauled or abandoned. Almost no one—except for those on the project’s ample payroll—seemed to think it was a good idea.
Now, it’s not unusual for scientists to disagree about research funding or methodology, but this was something else. The contempt for the Human Brain Project came from the very researchers, like computational neuroscientists, you’d expect to be excited about such a thing. In response, an independent mediator was appointed to review the project, and the director of the European Commission, which greenlighted the $1.6-billion, decade-long project, issued a statement days after the critics’ letter promising that the coming months would “see a satisfactory approach even on the issues raised by the critics.”
So several months have passed. Have the unsimulated minds of those critics been changed?
Nope. In fact, ask any neuroscientist about the Human Brain Project and you can pretty much count on a rant. In reply to an interview request, Konrad Kording, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, wrote back: “Why do you want to talk about this embarrassing corpse?” He added a smiley emoji, but he’s not really kidding. Mr. Kording has nothing nice to say about a project that, according to him, has become a reliable punchline among his colleagues. “I’m 100-percent convinced that virtually all the money spent on it will lead to no insight in neuroscience whatsoever,” he said. “It’s a complete waste. It’s boneheaded. It’s wrong. Everything that they’re trying to do makes no sense whatsoever.”
Jeremy Freeman is similarly skeptical, if a touch more diplomatic. Mr. Freeman, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, sees it as “kind of an absurd project” and misguided to boot. “Insofar as the goal is to establish a working simulation of the entire human brain, or even a single cortical column, I believe that it’s premature,” he said, chuckling. “I also don’t think rushing toward a simulation is the right avenue for progress.”
He and other critics say whole-brain simulation is nowhere close to achievable in 10 years. The human brain consists of roughly 100 billion neurons, each extremely complex in its own right, to say nothing of how they’re interconnected. Simulating their function would mean first figuring out what they all do and how they work together. Neuroscientists are a long way from understanding either. One compared the ambition to putting a person on a planet in another solar system before we land on Mars.
The other frequent objection is that simulating the entire human brain, assuming it could be done, might not be so useful. The Human Brain Project was pitched in part as a way to find new treatments for brain disease, but how creating a computer version of the human brain might lead there is lost on many neuroscientists. “It’s just ridiculous, right?” said Eero Simoncelli, a neuroscientist at New York University. “Would you try to understand the universe by simulating every molecule? What would you have achieved? It’s going to be just as complicated as the real thing and you won’t understand it any better.”
A Strong Personality
The Human Brain Project is the brainchild of Henry Markram, whose 2009 TED talk titled “A Brain in a Supercomputer” spelled out the project’s guiding vision. Mr. Markram is a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Lausanne, and was the project director for the Blue Brain Project, which successfully simulated one cortical column in a rat’s brain (rat brains have about 100,000 cortical columns).
It’s fair to say that many neuroscientists see Mr. Markram as the problem, arguing that he has sold the vision of whole-brain simulation to people who don’t know enough about the complexity of the brain to question it. “It’s all triggered by Henry’s very unreasonable claim—and I’m being polite here,” said Alexandre Pouget, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva and one of the authors of the July protest letter. “It is beyond unreasonable. It’s just not possible.”
Mr. Kording likens Mr. Markram to a preacher who is “not interested in truth,” only in pushing his message. Mr. Simoncelli calls the project “some combination of hype and a very strong personality.”
Meanwhile, the Brain Initiative gets good marks so far even from those who vehemently oppose the Human Brain Project. While also ambitious, the U.S. undertaking is seen as more grass-roots and collaborative. “It produces the right kind of competition,” said Mr. Kording. “Everyone is coming up with new ideas.”
Mr. Markram was not available for an interview, according to a project spokeswoman, but Sean Hill has been working to reassure the legions of doubters that the project is not a disaster. Mr. Hill, who is also a neuroscientist at the Lausanne institute and co-director of neuroinformatics at the Human Brain Project, sees it as mostly a failure of public perception.
“There’s definitely an element of us needing to change how we communicate the goals,” Mr. Hill said. Among the more modest ones, according to Mr. Hill, is providing a “collaborative infrastructure for team science” that will allow neuroscientists to share their findings.
Does that mean that the people behind the Human Brain Project will dial down expectations?
No, says Mr. Hill. Whole-brain simulation continues to be the ultimate objective, though he believes it’s “not likely” that it will be reached in a decade. “This is absolutely a visionary project. It is risky,” he said. “There are still major, major challenges.”
As for that still-secret independent mediator’s report, a researcher who has seen an early draft said it calls for significant changes in leadership and direction (a spokeswoman for the project said the report would probably be released in March or April). Another recent review from a panel of experts praised the project’s creativity but called for more “concrete results.” Whether such an overhaul would quiet the chorus of critics and save the project’s shaky scientific reputation remains to be seen.
Of course maybe the detractors have it wrong. Perhaps they’re too small-minded to grasp the genius of the Human Brain Project. Maybe they don’t like grand visions. Not so, says Mr. Pouget. “My goal in my life is to understand how the brain works, and it doesn’t get much grander than that,” he said. “I’m just not excited by making promises that are idiotic.”
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.
