In the first hint of how the Brain Initiative announced by President Obama in April could take shape, an advisory group on Monday recommended that the main target of research by the National Institutes of Health should be systems and circuits involving thousands to millions of brain cells — not the entire brain or individual cells and molecules.
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The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis S. Collins, at the announcement in April of the Brain Initiative.
The National Institutes of Health working group was meant to focus specifically on how the federal agency should spend its $40 million brain initiative budget in 2014. However, Dr. Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University who was not a member of the group, said that the recommendations, which he agreed with, were so ambitious that it "could be a charter for neuroscience for the next 10 to 15 years."
Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the N.I.H., who accepted the report and its recommendations, said that he had asked the group, led by Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and Bill Newsome of Stanford, to think big, and that it would be the job of the N.I.H. to make actual spending decisions.
Dr. Bargmann agreed that the overall goal of figuring out "how circuits in the brain generate complex thoughts and behavior" was not something to be tackled with the $40 million that the N.I.H. hopes to have for 2014.
"You can't do all of that in year one, you can't do all of that with $40 million, and you can't do all of that at N.I.H. either," she said.
The $40 million for the N.I.H. is part of a White House proposal for $100 million in spending on the initiative in the 2014 budget. The initiative also includes money for the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Several major private research foundations are also joining in the effort with their own research.
The report recommends that the N.I.H.'s immediate goals should be to develop new tools to investigate both animal and human brains and to accomplish basic, but so far elusive, goals like determining how many different types of neurons there are, what they do and how to study them. It proposed nine high-priority research areas, all of which could take many years and involve other agencies and institutions. But the report, said Dr. Collins, is "a great blueprint for getting started."
Comment during the presentation of the report, which was open to the public online, included some complaints from clinicians that the money should be directed to other areas like brain banks and specific diseases.
Gerald Rubin, the executive director of the Janelia Farm Research Campus in Virginia, part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and one of the private partners in the overall Brain Initiative, said he saw the report as "more of a manifesto for getting $500 million a year."
"They've given the vision for a grand challenge," he said, and he had "the highest praise and gratitude for their work."
"They just need to get the money," he said.
The working group will deliver a full report in June, after receiving public comment.
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