Paul Allen Gives Millions for Brain Research

Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, announced on Wednesday that he would commit $300 million over the next 10 years to turn the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a nonprofit organization he established to build a database of neural information, into a center for basic neuroscience investigation.

The institute will focus on counting and classifying the different types of neurons, illuminating the molecular machinery within the cells that can cause problems, and studying how the cells process information in networks, using as a model the visual system in mice.

Mr. Allen, whose 2011 book about Microsoft’s early days, “Idea Man,” exposed a rift with his fellow philanthropist and company co-founder Bill Gates, said in a news conference that his growing investment in brain science, now more than $500 million, has both intellectual and personal motives.

"As someone who has been touched by the impact of a neurodegenerative disease - my mother has Alzheimer’s - there’s both a fascination in basic research and the hope that we can move things forward."

Experts in brain science have expressed frustration at the pace of discovery and the devastating complexity of brain disorders. The Allen Institute, which began operating in 2003 as a resource for researchers, created brain “atlases” of the mouse and adult human brains and electronic maps accessible online that show which genes are switched on in neurons. The site has been getting about 50,000 visits per month. Still, researchers have learned very little about the causes of brain disorders.

The announcement was made at a press conference today in Seattle and in a commentary in Nature, one of the world’s best scientific journals, written by Christof Koch, the Institute’s Chief Scientific Officer, and R. Clay Reid of Harvard Medical School. They lay out a way of doing brain research that involves optogenetics, a kind of deep stimulation of the brain using light, connectomics, the study of connections in the brain, and brain observatories, ways of monitoring what happens in the brain in real time. Right now, because the mouse is smaller and simpler, much of the early efforts focus on the mouse brain. One of Allen’s new efforts is to map the visual connections between the brain and the mouse. There, mice have perhaps 2 million neurons involved in vision, compared to 5 billion such cells for humans.

"This is a hugely challenging area," Mr. Allen said, "and it cries out for this kind of industrial-scale effort."

“If you start out as a programmer, as I did in high school, the brain works in a completely different fashion than computers do,” Allen said, calling the effort “fascinating” and “noting that he’s been touched by neurodegenerative diseases” - his mother has Alzheimer’s. On the call he noted that while it’s possible to teach a student — a human brain — to program a computer in a matter of years, a computer can’t learn to function like a human brain even given a lifetime of opportunity. “”You can’t create an artificial intelligence,” Allen said, “unless you know how the real thing works.” ###