1 Boring Old Man

Obama Kicks Off $100-Million Project to Study Brain Function
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Paul Basken
April 2, 2013

President Obama on Tuesday outlined a $100-million project to study brain function, saying he hoped to help scientists gain fundamental understandings and tools that would lead to breakthroughs in treating conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and stroke. The project, which Mr. Obama first described in February in his State of the Union address, will be known as Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or the Brain Initiative. "There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the Brain Initiative will change that," Mr. Obama told a White House assembly filled with researchers and leaders of public and private science agencies.

In the weeks since the State of the Union address, the fledgling idea attracted both plaudits and criticisms, with the latter centering on the plausibility of mapping the entire human brain and the wisdom of dedicating increasingly scarce federal dollars to single large-scale endeavors…

"We have been a nation of dreamers and risk takers," Mr. Obama said. "People who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it." Mr. Obama further emphasized the connection by being introduced in the East Room by Francis S. Collins, the current director of the National Institutes of Health, who led the genome project. Dr. Collins repeatedly described the new endeavor as an "ambitious project—some might even call it audacious," and yet appropriate for the current state of technology…

Initially, at least, the project will be mostly about developing technology, Mr. Newsome said. The human brain consists of some 100 billion neurons that each react electrically when stimulated, passing along data. To deal with many of the questions they are trying to answer, scientists will need far better tools for measuring and recording those data, Mr. Newsome said…

The director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arati Prabhakar, joined Dr. Collins in a series of White House appearances on Tuesday to promote the Brain Initiative. She repeatedly offered hope for technologies that might help wounded soldiers regain healthy mental functioning after injuries…

As with the genome project, the Brain Initiative seeks to advance both scientific knowledge and technology, Mr. Tripp said. That could lead to tools, sensors, informatics, and knowledge applications in both medicine and outside fields, including agriculture, forensic science, industrial biotechnology, and environmental sciences, he said. Computing advances could help in artificial intelligence, education, and training, Mr. Tripp said, and health advances could lower costs of health care and improve labor-productivity rates. The Human Genome Project, he said, also generated "plenty of naysayers saying it can’t be done—that the scope of the problem is simply too huge and the approach being taken is not going to work."

I have no clue as to the details, what they have in mind. I doubt they do either. But my reaction is in the range of muted. Clinical Psychiatry has lost itself in a cloud of future·think right now. Over the twentieth century, medicine had moved from a caretaking profession to a treatment oriented profession, and psychiatry lagged behind. In addition, when treatments like Penicillin for Syphilis came around, the illnesses fell away to different specialties. In the 1970s, psychiatry’s place as a medical specialty was regularly debated – so the whole specialty declared itself a neuroscience think·tank in its 1980 biomedical revolution. Moving on the explosion of psychoactive drugs from the 1950s [Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, Anxiolytics, Lithium], psychiatry turned to psychopharmacology and neuroscience as its defining paradigms and cloaked itself in evidence-based medicine, clinical drug trials, and translational research.

In spite of the rhetoric, the addition of a lot of technology, and a few new drugs [variations on the 1950s themes], the revolution hasn’t produced much except for future·think, a shameful alliance with industry, and an almost religious clinging to the idea of clinical drug trials and translational research. As each new technology comes along [neuroimaging, genomics, proteomics, etc.], it gets applied to clinical syndromes or drug trials in hopes of finding something that can achieve clinical usefulness. The whole thrust of the DSM-5 revision of the diagnostic manual was planned around adding pathophysiologic parameters [unsuccessful]. The NIMH is actually working on classifying mental illness by technology rather than along clinical grounds [the RDoC]. And they are doling out research money based on how a grant request fits some current scheme – almost always tied to some hoped for application that never seems to show up. So maybe Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies will create a future·think·tank that can harness all the frantic energy, gather the creative neuroscientists rather than the wanna-bes and the hangers-on, and get something accomplished.

That’s a wish. A more likely real world assessment is that this is a bailout for the Neuroscientists under the usual direction of the epidemic-of-mental-illness-looming-in-our-future set after the exit of the pharmaceutical industry from CNS Drug research. There are some all too familiar code words in the acronym: B·R·A·I·N = Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.

^{I’m surprised it wasn’t B·R·A·I·N² = Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Novel Neurotechnologies [I guess the Prez is a stickler for spelling]. Oh yeah, there was another new catch phrase I neglected to include – "An Avalanche Is Poised"…}