SCIENCE POLICY IN SOCIETY

Science 1 November 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6158 pp. 533-533
DOI:10.1126/science.1247343

EDITORIAL: Seize the Neuroscience Moment by Alan I. Leshner

COMMENTS: I and II by Nils-Göran Areskoug (with minor corrections)

From Mirage to Reality. And from Big to Great...(I)

While the primary target of investigation in the Human Genome Project (HGP or HUGO) was still human biology, the emphasis in the HBP lies far ahead, in neuromorphic computing, the virtual engineering method for simulating the entire human brain. Unless the supercomputer can map, represent and simulate the entire information of the whole world, the method of narrowing down the focal point of the study to the inside of the brain gives rise to some doubt.

The program of HBP promises an exciting journey into our internal universe that would have been unfathomable even to the renaissance geniuses. Maybe this huge collaborative effort will discover some new stars on the human firmament. But since the brain evolved as an organ to serve our survival by helping us to direct ourselves towards the outer world, connect and navigate in the environment, the exclusion of external interaction (such as those in human interrelations) from the scope of investigation, is likely to limit the prospects of the program.

No doubt, new vistas of understanding connective intrarelations will stimulate the “neuroscientist community” (whoever that term may include) to undertake unprecedented enquiries. While their primary goal to “better understand how the pieces of the brain fit and work together” may be suitable for developing an outstanding neuromorphic supercomputer (itself the utmost instrumental extension of the brain), this farsighted spot looks more like the 'wet dream' of the engineer than that of the doctor and patient.

It is a research endeavor driven and designed more by technical interest than by social and clinical need.

References

Leshner, Alan I (2013) Seize the Neuroscience Moment. Science 342, 1 November, 533 Nowotny, Helga (2013) Fulfilling the Genomic Promise. Project Syndicate, 9 July 2013 The Human Brain Project (2013) Online:https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

Submitted on Sun, 11/03/2013 - 14:20

From Mirage to Reality. From Big to Great. (II)

In her policy essay on fulfilling the genomic promise, leading science sociologist Helga Nowotny suggests that public trust in science has not wavered since (I submit, even before) the Enlightenment. That public faith, spearheaded by pioneers like Tycho Brahe and Francis Bacon, laid the ground for modern science’s program of reforming society by using human reason. The reciprocity of that trust may now have been strained and stressed by the meager outcomes of previous megaprojects, frustrating already tense relations between policy-makers, scientists and the public opinion.

Surprisingly, historical precedents provide a healthy perspective to the outlook for the present European mega-research enterprise. While the Human Brain Project (HBP), led by Henry Markram at EPFL in Switzerland, eloquently elaborates the rhetoric of Bacon’s vision, the means and modes of implementing it practically resemble a prolongation of Brahe’s instrumental treatise (Instauratio mechanicae). No wonder instruments (computers in bioinformatics) must be developed to "twist and turn nature to reveal its secrets" and applied to fulfil science’s original promise to society. But there is a difference...

Although extensive networking between partners and participants, among colleagues and collaborators, will inevitably disseminate important interdisciplinary learning among graduate students, the simplistic concept of “transdisciplinary education” adopted in the program (whereby students will learn merely another basic subject outside their major) does not engender a workable strategy for attaining the epistemic integration between clinical practice and theoretical simulation needed to deliver the values promised in the program.

With much respect for the fresh approach seen in Henry Markram’s research on autism, and with due honor to his and his assistants’ organizational zeal, it would even seem verging on the presumptuous to disseminate the belief that this methodology will produce applicable understanding of “how to diagnose and treat brain diseases”. There is still a gap to close between the real and virtual world if that is at all an advisable adventure.

References

Submitted on Sun, 11/03/2013 - 13:50

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