Five hundred million dollars can buy a lot of basic scientific research.
Last month, Paul G. Allen, who founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, announced that he would give the Allen Institute for Brain Science, in Seattle, an additional $300-million, on top of $200-million he had already donated since 2003 to establish and run the facility.
With that infusion, the institute is luring some of the country’s leading neuroscientists. The newest are Ricardo Dolmetsch, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, and R. Clay Reid, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Both will start officially at the Allen Institute this summer, but already are active there alongside another recent hire, the California Institute of Technology’s Christof Koch, the institute’s new chief scientific officer.
Mr. Allen’s donations will be used to double the institute’s size over the next four years, from its current staff of 180 scientists, researchers, and other staff members, and to move into large new quarters.
The institute’s aims are to understand how the brain works, what goes wrong in brain-related diseases and disorders, and how to treat them. Among key questions: How does the brain process information; what cellular structures underlie brain function; and how do brain cells create the circuits that drive behavior, thought, and dysfunction?
The institute has focused on creating atlases of the brain of the mouse—a far simpler model than the human brain—and the brain’s handing of optical stimuli, as a steppingstone to other, even more complex brain functions. Among the achievements at the Seattle center has been the development of methods for using laser pulses to stimulate particular neural circuits in mouse brains. That allows researchers to zero in on what happens in particular, tagged brain cells.
Officials say they believe the institute’s approaches will revolutionize understanding of the mammalian brain. Researchers, both at the institute and at thousands of other labs around the world, admit that the brain jealously guards most of its mysteries, but the Allen Institute’s new hires are optimistic that the Seattle institution’s approaches will rapidly unravel them.
Mr. Dolmetsch said university- and government-financed labs cannot afford the personnel and equipment to perform the multidisciplinary work that Mr. Allen wishes to encourage. Institute scientists expect to make their findings available to researchers around the world via freely accessible online databases.
Mr. Dolmetsch, whose specializations include such neurodevelopmental disorders as autism, said the approach is a brain-science equivalent of such developments as DNA sequencing in genomics as a way to provide powerful tools for researchers worldwide.
He said: “We hope to be able to recruit a lot of people. The project is going to be a large and really attractive one, especially now that other funding is difficult to get.”
