Bill Newsome, PhD, knows the brain perhaps as well as the back of his hand. The Stanford neurobiologist was vice chair of the federal BRAIN Initiative launched by President Obama, and he directs the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. From that spot, he's just funded a first round of interdisciplinary grants to Stanford faculty that he calls "risk taking." The need, he told me in this just-published 1:2:1 podcast, is critical:
When biomedical research money gets tight, as it now is, the funding agencies tend to get conservative. Right now we have these talented faculty at Stanford, many of them young faculty. They're at the most creative parts of their career. They're at a place where they're thinking big and dreaming big. We wanted to create this mechanism to allow them to do that.
I asked Newsome about the greatest challenges for neuroscience in the next few years. He had one word: technology. "If we were to improve the technology... If we could read out signals from the human brain and read in signals, actually do the circuit-tuning in the human brain non-invasively, at a spatial scale on the order of a millimeter or less and with fairly rapid time, it would revolutionize neuroscience," he said.
So paint the picture, I asked, and look ten years out. What would you like to see as far as progress? He told me:
I would like to see fundamental, substantive change on at least one devastating neurological or psychiatric disease. I don't really care which one. Give me Alzheimer's. Give me autism. Give me depression. Give me Parkinson's disease. At the end of 10 years, if we can really have a breakthrough in the understanding of what causes one of those diseases mechanistically and have a therapy that dramatically improves people's lives... I would say, 'It's worth it. We've done our job.'
Any worries or words of caution? He laments the current state of federal funding for science and worries that fiscal constraints will squeeze out young star scientists. "How do you keep convincing talented people to come into the field?" he said. "We're deprioritizing science... How do we convince our brightest, our best, that this is a field with a really bright future?"
Previously: Deciphering "three pounds of goo" with Stanford neurobiologist Bill Newsome, Neuroscientists dream big, come up with ideas for prosthetics, mental health, stroke and more, BRAIN Initiative and the Human Brain Project: Aiming to understand how the brain works, Brain's gain: Stanford neuroscientist discusses two major new initiatives and Co-leader of Obama's BRAIN Initiative to direct Stanford's interdisciplinary neuroscience institute
Photo by Allan Ajifo
