Brainstormers: Obama's big research push kicks off with a meeting of the minds

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The motley group included men and women, old and young, in sweatshirts and three-piece suits, shod in socks and sandals, wingtips and heels. They were a kind of neuroscience dream team, more than 100 scientists gathered in a Bethesda, Maryland, hotel not to talk about their latest breakthroughs there weren't any yet but to meet and get to know one another.

Eighteen months after President Barack Obama launched an ambitious brain-research initiative, likened by some to the moon shot of the 1960s, federal officials are trying to create a new model for neuroscience research, one that emphasizes innovation and cooperation across specialities and institutions. To do that, they threw a two-day "kickoff" for scientists fortunate enough to have received the first funding slices of what is likely to be a multibillion-dollar federal pie.

The "mixer" in Maryland was organized by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, two of the agencies leading the sweeping scientific effort to develop a complete guide to the anatomy, activity and functioning of the human brain. The government's scientists already had tossed out the playbook on how research usually is done conservatively, competitively and narrowly and had embraced the highest-risk, highest-reward research projects they could identify.

The first grants for the BRAIN Initiative, whose formal name is Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, were awarded in September; the November mixer provided intellectual cross-pollination for the researchers involved. Now, as the new year starts, the hard, slow grind for answers to some of the most enduring mysteries of the human mind is getting underway.

The architects of the project, which could provide clues to ailments such as Alzheimer's and schizophrenia, wait anxiously in the wings, hoping their efforts will help speed that process. "This can't be business as usual," said one of those architects, Rockefeller University neurobiologist Cornelia Bargmann. "This is a new culture bridging physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists . . . with a big emphasis on showing new results and discoveries."

The impetus for the brain-research effort, announced by Obama in April 2013, was a simple, staggering statistic: 1 in 4 families worldwide includes someone who suffers from a brain injury, disease or disorder, including psychiatric illnesses and developmental disorders, according to MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. In the United States, the economic burden for neurological problems is nearly a half-trillion dollars every year.

That formidable arithmetic fueled the belief that the initiative and everything about it, from its goals to the scientists picked to pursue those goals needed to be innovative.

Participants often compare their mission to the Human Genome Project, the massive, federally funded collaboration that mapped the order of organic compounds in human DNA. Those compounds are fundamental to the growth and development of all organisms in the same way that neurons are key to their functioning. But understanding the precise structure, organization and activity of human brain cells is massively more complex than unraveling human DNA.

There are approximately 86 billion neurons in our brain, and at a minimum those neurons contain 100 trillion synapses, or connections. Identifying synaptic connections is further complicated by the fact that while the genome is essentially fixed, the brain is changing constantly. Every thought, every emotion, every act we perform creates, redirects, strengthens or weakens neural connections.

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Brainstormers: Obama's big research push kicks off with a meeting of the minds