A billion-dollar European effort to model the human brain in a supercomputer is in danger of collapsing amid skepticism this is even possible.
Not even a year after it was launched by the European Union, the Human Brain Project is the target of an open letter from neuroscientists, saying it is “not on course” due to “substantial failures” including a “overly narrow” focus on the dream of its founder, who has long tried to build a digital brain.
Delivered to EU funders this week, the letter threatened a scientific boycott unless the project is immediately and independently reviewed.
“We strongly question whether the goals and implementation of the HBP are adequate to form the nucleus of the collaborative effort in Europe that will further our understanding of the brain,” reads the letter, which as of Tuesday had the signatures of nearly 400 neuroscientists, mainly European, including two from Canada.
At issue is the idea of recreating a brain, neuron by neuron, in a powerful computer, and then seeing if it behaves like a real brain, the most complex object known to science.
It is the leading example of what is known as “in silico” neuroscience, which has risen in prominence along with computing power, despite philosophical concerns that brains cannot be reduced to the ones and zeroes of digital computation.
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Now critics are complaining the Human Brain Project was pitched as neuroscience, but is in fact a computing enterprise, almost a vanity project, with no hope of probing the real mysteries of consciousness and cognition.
The HBP has been “controversial and divisive,” the letter says, and many labs refused to join “because of its focus on an overly narrow approach, leading to a significant risk that it would fail to meet its goals.”
Last month, a proposal for its second round of pledged funding — roughly 50-million euros per year for the main project, and the same for partnerships, with an estimated 10-year total over 1-billion euros — “reflected an even further narrowing of goals and funding allocation, including the removal of an entire neuroscience subproject and the consequent deletion of 18 additional laboratories.”
AP Photo/Keystone, Jean-Christophe BottHenry Markram, neuroscientist and co-director of the Human Brain Project, HBP, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne.
As a major government investment in frontier research, the HBP is similar to U.S. President Barack Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. A key difference is that the American work is being done in the traditional model, by many small teams that occasionally collaborate.
In Europe, on the other hand, the HBP is overseen by a single charismatic visionary, Henry Markram, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
In interviews about the letter, he was defensive, and said a “paradigm shift” is underway that threatens old academic orders, similar to the rise of the human genome project.
“I think we need to communicate more that it’s going to actually help them get more funding,” Prof. Markram told the Associated Press. “They feel that money is being taken away, that it’s going to distract from the important work that they’re doing. There is really not a threat.”
Before it was even chosen for the funding, in 2012, a leading University of Toronto researcher was deeply critical of the Human Brain Project, and said most informed people think it is “crazy.”
“I deeply don’t believe in this [EU Human Brain] project. I think putting a lot of money into understanding how the brain works is an excellent idea. I don’t think that pouring it into a project that most people in the field think is crazy is the right thing to do,” said Geoffrey Hinton, then an expert in machine learning at the University of Toronto, now employed by Google. “This is a project dressed up to get flagship money…. I’ve never met anybody who thought it was a good idea. I’ve met lots of people who think it is a terrible idea… The real problem with that project is they have no clue how to get a large system like that to learn.”
It is not the only digital brain. In Toronto, for example, a team at Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute has built a Virtual Brain, which aims to recreate the structure and function of grey matter, including its “plasticity,” or its capacity to reorganize after damage.
Another, called SPAUN, was created by Chris Eliasmith, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo, and has replicated human brain behaviour such as counting, pattern recognition and learning by reinforcement, albeit at a much slower pace than a real brain.
National Post
AP Photo/Keystone/Laurent GillieronIn this May 9, 2011 file picture people use a infrared-DIC microscopy to do multi-neuron patch-clamp recording in the Blue Brain team and the Human Brain Project (HBP) laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland.