Additional funding provided by these funder its . From our studios in new york city this is charlie rose. Tonight we continue our exploration of our magnificent human brain with a consideration of president obamas new Brain Initiative. The president announced in april the new effort which seeks to revolutionize our understanding of 9 human brain. He has described the initiative as one of his administrations grand challenges for the 21st century. Project has drawn comparisons to the human again only project as well as president kenny kennedys 1961 challenge to land a human on the moon in 10 years. Two National Student of Health Directors helping to lead the initiative join us now, story landis, thomas insel and with us are colonelia bargmann of Rockefeller University and William Newsome of standford. They are cochairs of the Advisory Board for the initiative. An once again my cohost is dr. Eric kandel. He is a nobel laureate, professor at Columbia University and Howard Hughes medical investigator. Im pleased to have all of them at this table. And so we begin once again with my colleague dr. Eric kandel to give us a look at what we might include in this program as we look at this initiative. Welcome. Chrlie, you outlined it very well as alwaysment today we look at the Obama Brain Initiative which is designed to get a better understanding of the human brain. The human brain looks simple enough t weighs about 3 pounds and if you look at the image on the screen, as threatically pleasing. It looks like it would not be very difficult to understand. The fact is its the most complex object in the universe. It makes us who we are. Its responsible for every behavior, every thought, action that we carry out from the simplest automatic behaviors like breathing and swallowing to walking, running, and cognitive acts like planning, thinking, creating works of art. But how one moves from those higher mental processes to understanding how the brain mediates that is an extraordinary difficult challenge. I think most scientists consider this the greatest challenge in the 2 1st century. In fact, one can argue its the greatest challenge science has ever faced. You mentioned putting a person on the moon. The human genome, these are enormous accomplishments. They dont compare in complexity. Rose pail by comparison. They pail by comparison to this, this is an extraordinary difficult tax. This is as you pointed out where president obama appreciated when he announced in the press conference in april that several us attended that this is the next major american initiative. Thank you all for being here today. Im francis collins, director of the National Institute its of health. Hnih and i am proud to have the honor of welcoming you here to the east room of the white house for a very special scientific announcement. So without further ado, it is a great personal privilege and a high honor to introdeutz our scientist in chief, the president of the United States, barack obama. applause ideas are what power our economy. Its what set its us apart. We do innovation better than anybody. And that makes our economy stronger. And every dollar we spend to map the human genome has returned a 140 dollars to our economy. One dollar of investments, 140 in return. So dr. Collins help lead that genome effort, and thats why we thought it was appropriate to have him here to announce the next Great American project and thats what were calling the Brain Initiative. As humans we can identify galaxies lightyears away. We can study particles smaller than an a tomorrow but we still havent unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears. So as a result were still unable to cure diseases like alzheimer or autism or fully reverse the effects of a stroke. Theres this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked. And the Brain Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action, and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be, will be transform difficult. Imagine if no family had to feel helpless watching a loved one disappear behind the mask of parkinsons or struggle in the grip of ep will will epilepsy. Imagine if we can reverse traumatic brain injury or ptsd for our veterans coming home or if millions of americans were suddenly finding new jobs in these fields. Jobs we havent even dreamt up yet because we chose to invest in this project. We cant afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead. I dont want the next job creating discoveries to happen in china or india or germany. I want them to happen right here in the United States of america. And thats part of what this Brain Initiative is about. We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions but billions of people on this planet. As president obama made clear the Brain Initiative is a very ambitious project. And it has a number of partners both public and private. The Public Partners are the nih, the National Science foundation, and the defense establishment. And the private ones are the allen institute, the Howard Hughes medical institute, the Salk Institute and the kennedy foundation. These have their independent leadership but the coordination is going to be provided by the National Institute of health and its director Francis Colins with the help of story landis and tom insell and the institute of mental health. The nih is also appointed an extraordinary Scientific Advisory committee, the best people in the field and cochaired by corey bogman and bill newsome. So we have four of the major leaders of this effort and we will see what the names of this effort are and how were going to achieve it now despite the fact that this is an enormous challenge, we couldnt be in a better position to take it on. And this is for several reasons. One is as anyone listening to the brain series would appreciate, neuroscience has not exactly been sleeping for the last several decades. Theres been enormous progress although we have a long, long way to go. For example, in simple animals such as worms and flies and mice, we are beginning to understand how systems work, hour motor systems function, how they interact with one another and we understand simple forms of learning and how memory is stored. In complex animals and primates we understand cognitive functions that dont even involve movements of the body. Thinking, planning, acting. We understand this and are beginning to understand this in var yis levels. So why is this useful . Evolution is conservative. Once we work out how a biological problem is solved the chances are components of it are going to be conserved. So this is going to provide background knowledge for understanding the human brain. A second point is that in order to make advances we need Technological Developments. And i think its fair to say that weve never been in a better position in terms of Technological Developments than we are right now. When i began in neuroscience a mere 55 years ago we recorded from one cell at a time, now we can record from several hundred cells at the same time. This is necessary but not sufficient. We can also ask how are they interconnected. How do they control behavior. We can activate certain patterns of neurons and others we can inhibit certain cells and ask what is the consequences of question javier. This is a very powerful set of methodologies. Not only do we have physical logical methodologies but wonderful anatomical methodologies to see how the nerve cells are interconnected. Third, were not alone in this project. There is a parallel effort in europe,s had a very different purpose. Its designed to simulate the human brain with supercomputers. Now the overall purpose of the Brain Initiative is to understand the normal human brain. But its inconceivable that studying the normal human brain wouldnt have fantastic spinoffs for schizophrenia, depression, Alzheimer Disease, parkinsons disease, the list goes on, the tragedy of humankind. These are the kinds of things we ultimately want to understand. So is the challenges are enormous. But the opportunities are great. And were going have a wonderful discussion of how to approach this. Rose before i turn to tom, tell me who can claim credit for first having this idea . Do you know . Probably came from the kevly initiative. Rose really they said why dont dow something they said to people in the white house why dont we do Something Like this. Rose and the president was responsive because did he say immediately i like this idea. I think he has been listening to charlie picture of the full wiring diagram of the human brain. And thats pretty exciting. Everything i are just told you mouse and human are still sort of static images and i think the challenge for us in the way that eric talked about is how do you go from static to dynamic. The president said we need a dynamic picture of the brain and how the brain does thought. Rose now the human genome project did not have a specific end date. The president said in ten years well do man on the moon. What is the time frame work for this . Its impossible to say the time frame. The human brain is much more complicated, with the human genome we knew what the end point is. You wanted to have a complete sequence. Human genes. Here we dont know what the logic of the brain is. We dont know what the end point is were going to find it out as we go along. So i would say you know were looking something that realistically is between 50 and 100 years. 50 and 100 years. Yeah. But there will be progress. There will be enormous progress all along the way but a complete understanding of the human brain is to the going to be done in 20 or 30 years. Rose okay. I think obama had it right when he said this is a grand challenge for the 21st century. I think the longterm, you know, to really get to the human brain and its dynamic activity and how it relates to our cognitive and emotions, i think it goes far beyond 10 years but we have very specific goals that we can hit in the next ten years. We have more reason to start early. Let me so what makes it, what makes this so enormous and so much larger than anything weve done before whether its putting the engineering or putting the man on the moon or the supercomputer that helped us map the human genome. The main thing is what eric said awhile ago is that this is the most complex entity in the known university. Because . Because it has a hundred million parts, a hundred million neurons, those each have millions of parts. What is a neuron. A nerve cell. So weve got the basic signaling element and each neuron itself is a very complex little device an each neuron connects to a thousand other neurons so when you start looking at the map of the web of the connections it is simply the most complex map that we know of in the world. So many of all those neurons are organized into circuits. One several connected to others connected to others like the leg bone to the knee bone to the thighbone to the hip bone. And we dont understand how information is processed as one neuron connects and speaks to another. Were beginning to get some pretty important insights because theres now a tool optogenetics that allows us to turn particular neurons in a circuit on or off. What youll see is a rat freely moving, behalfing rat which has attached to its head a light emitting diode. And that light emitting diode is simulating particular sets of neurons. And the red light is actually inhibiting that nerve cell, the star shaped thing, and the blue lights are exciting other neurons. So this is a tool that lets us detect the roles of particular neurons in circuits which mediate particular behaviors. And weve learned some Amazing Things using this tool. So if you have a stroke, a corticol stroke, its not uncommon for patients who have had a stroke to actually end up with epilepsy. And weve not known seizures. Weve not known what the source of that hyperexcise ability is. But using this tool we now know that its nerve cells in a particular part of the brain called the thalamus which will give us cues as to how we pit intervene. Or people have discovered that theres actually a circuit in the hypocampus the part of the brain that deals with memory which mediates a fear response and if you excite those neurons will you get a rat to freeze in place just as it would if it got an he verse of stimulus. So this it tool is owning up a way to understand how particular elements in the circuits in the brain work. Now what we need to do taking these tools, the ones that tom talked about, the one that i spoke about and there are many others but time is not infinite is to think about how we go to plan from where we are now to have a deep conversation about what the goals achievable goals in the next five years or 10 years for the Brain Initiative would be. You need to have a conversation among scientists about what is achievable in the next ten years or is it a broader conversation with private and everybody else. I think its a broader conversation but its starting with scientists, neuroscientists, engineers, nanotechnologists, material scientists, to begin to think about if you could dream up any tool that you would like to study the brain, what would it be. Dont think about what we can do now but what you would like to do. Ferndz what will the steps you could get to in five years and ten years and to begin to think about what the deliverables would be. That is the question i like, tell me what you think we need to do to start the conversation. Well, the first thing we need to do is to just break down the problem and ask what sorts of things we would like to be able to do. Thats a very broad conversation among neuroscientists. So you saw these pictures of the human brain. You saw what a nerve cell is there are tens of billions of nerve cells in the human brain that means there are more nerve cells in your brain than human beings on the entire planet. And were trying to understand whats going on in the equivalent of the entire planet at the same time. And so we have to break that problem down. And one of the things to understand is that these guys are not acting niply of each other. Nerve cells act together. They act together locally in groups. They act together over the entire brain. So your whole brain makes a decision about what you are doing. And that makes the problem very complicated in humans. So we try and break the problem down at different levels. We try to look at sort of parts of the human brain at a large scale but we also try to look at simpler brain because there are animals that have just a few hundred nerve cells or a few thousand nerve cells or a few hundred thousand nerve cells. And yet these animals also have brains that can make decisions, that can perceive the environment, that can learn, remember, fight, mate, choose a partner, rear their young. And all of those are done with much simpler brains. And the idea of trying to understand a brain with just a few thousands of neurons or a few hundreds of neurons gives you the possibility of understanding what every element is doing so you can try to understand how the behavior of the whole brain relates to the behavior of all of the individual little moving parts. So we need to work back and forth from simple levels to complex levels. Thats what well need to understand what these kinds of circuits and networks the cells are doing. And unstanding the brain as a whole is really critical. If you think of the brain as just one part that does one thing and another part that does another thing, youre missing something very important and youre missing probably some of our major avenues of making progress in terms of Brain Disorders. Its understanding the whole network that we need to have. So not to embarrass you or bill, but when you were named as cochair of the Advisory Committee what were your marching orders . Our marching orders were to determine how the activity the of the brain and time and space gives rise to our thoughts, our perceptions, our memories. In four months. In four months. Our main watch marching order was to follow corey, actually. Rose and build on what we already know. But be clear, this initiative is to the about entirely solving the problem but developing the tools to help us address the problem in a new way. And what the president talks about is he says neurotechnologies. Hes looking for us to create the next generation of tools so that we can attack this with a lot more precision than weve been able to up until now. So i think this is very critical insight. When corey and i originally formed this committee, our charge was to really create the next generation of tools thats going to allow the science to flourish much more than it has now. Most of us who have been in this field for a few decades understand that there is a revolution going on right now. So these tools youve heard mentioned in the show already did not exist eight years ago. Opti genetics did not exist eight years ago. Some of the ones you will see in just a few minutes did not exist six months ago. And the pace of technological change is so rapid right now that those of us who were traditional spermal scientists have to say whoa, what does it even mean to be an spermal scientist in this day and ajs. We have to think what sperms are possible and it opens up vistas that have just, were unimaginable, charlie, ten years ago. So obama really picked, he was pres cents. He picked an amazing time. I mean it was the right project at the right time because the technologies are enabling and the technological pace of change is going to accelerate over the next five years. Do i hear you saying part of the difficulty or challenge you have to find the tools to make the discovery you need to page. But the tools are coming. The tools are coming an