Seeking a common focus for research Hayden Bird/Getty

As brainy gatherings go, it takes some beating. Neuroscientists are meeting in New York today to agree on a global mission to understand the workings of the human brain and how to fix it when something goes wrong.

The lofty aim of the Coordinating Global Brain Projects meeting is to unify worldwide efforts to study the brain, in the same way that international collaborations have spurred on astronomy, physics and genetics.

“Neuroscience is coming of age, and it’s now ready for big science,” says Rafael Yuste at Columbia University in New York, who organised today’s meeting with Cori Bargmann at Rockefeller University, also in New York. “This is the first real meeting with all the players in the same room together,” says Yuste.


Among those invited are representatives from charities, private companies and national brain research initiatives. The Global Brain Initiative they want to develop will decide which projects and goals to prioritise, as well as how they should be funded.

”We hope to learn what all the active and planned brain projects are around the world,” says Bargmann. “And we want all leaders of these projects to meet in person, so there’s a human connection for future collaboration,” she says. Yuste hopes that the meeting will establish a standing committee made up of representatives from all the main players. <

Many big, long-term brain research projects have been established worldwide in recent years, including the $6 billion US BRAIN Initiative, and Europe’s €1 billion Human Brain Project.

Different priorities

Other regions are now entering the fray, with China and Japan both launching major initiatives earlier this year that seek to understand the human brain by studying monkeys. “China is the big player that hasn’t yet put its cards on the table,” says Yuste.

Reconciling these programmes’ priorities and methods may prove a challenge. There is vociferous opposition to research on primate research in several Western nations, where neuroscientists now tend to work with flies, worms, mice and fish instead. But in China and Japan, research is more focused on primates, our closest animal relatives.

China’s top priority is to discover the basis of human cognition, with new medical treatments and spin-off benefits for computing as secondary goals. The US BRAIN Initiative, by contrast, is focused firmly on providing better resources and tools for experiments, rather than dictating research priorities.

Whatever the differences, the imperative to come together is strong, says Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who will wrap up the meeting later today. “We need to unite behind a coordinated international brain project bringing together the world’s best and brightest scientists and engineers,” he says.