The British Neuroscience Association (BNA) is teaming up with the Edinburgh International Science Festival for its annual conference this April. The BNA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its origins as a small discussion group meeting monthly upstairs in a London pub. The Science Festival is just half as old. The very term neuroscience was unfamiliar half a century ago—it had been coined in the early 1960s by a far-seeing Massachusetts Institute of Technology biophysicist, Francis Schmitt. Schmitt had raised the funds to publish an irregular bulletin packed with provocative thoughts on everything from synaptic function to artificial intelligence, and more importantly, to support a month long summer school for budding neuroscientists at Boulder, Colorado, USA, to which my then boss, penicillin Nobel Laureate Ernst Chain, duly dispatched me. In the 1960s, most researchers on the brain still spoke of themselves by their primary discipline, as neuroanatomists, neurochemists, neuropharmacologists. Schmitt's Neuroscience Research Program (NRP) was intended to bridge and hopefully integrate these many disciplines studying brain and behaviour. Interdisciplinarity was to be its means and bridging theories to connect the many levels at which the brain could be studied its goal.

Back in London, though, brain researchers were scattered not just across many disciplines, but also many institutions. In the spirit of the NRP, half a dozen of us agreed to contact as many as possible of the researchers in the London area with the idea of establishing a regular discussion group. After the first meeting in a university lecture theatre, we quickly realised that a more informal setting would work better, and opted for the Black Horse pub in Rathbone Place, in central London, with, importantly, beer on tap. To ensure informal speculation, we discouraged heads of department and senior professors from attending, and to encourage interdisciplinarity each meeting was organised around a topic—memory, sleep, or whatever—which could be approached at many different levels, from the molecular to the systems and behavioural. Still shy of the term neuroscience, we were initially simply the Black Horse Group.

Our enthusiastic informality was put onto a more regular footing in 1967 by the arrival in London of the neurophysiologist Patrick Wall, who had a small grant from a US foundation to foster neuroscience communication. Together with Pat came John O'Keefe, fittingly the 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine for his work on—in the words of his and Lynn Nadel's groundbreaking 1978 book—The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. The next goal that some of us espoused was the creation of an interdisciplinary Brain Research Institute to match those already existing elsewhere in Europe and the USA. The project foundered on the rocks of institutional rivalry, so there's an agreeable symmetry in watching the huge new Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour, directed by O'Keefe, rising from a building site close to that we had found all those years ago.

The London group soon spawned regional equivalents, and we became—still informally—a national society—the Brain Research Association (BRA). Such a relaxed approach was not to last. Prodded by the International Brain Research Organisation and its UK representative, Derek Richter, we formalised the membership, adopted a constitution, and elected a national committee. Annual meetings and schools soon followed, along with all the trappings of a learned society, with the exception of a house journal, which we resisted—a gap later filled by the successful European Journal of Neuroscience. Finally, in 1996, the BRA bowed to the inevitable and became the BNA.

The BNA's half-century thus parallels the transformation of the small-scale sciences of brain and behaviour into one of today's most prominent and fashionable areas of biomedical research. The neuro- prefix has entered into popular discourse, joining and even threatening to eclipse DNA as a selling point. It is hard to imagine what Schmitt would have made of neurogastronomy or neurohomoeopathy, to say nothing of the brightly coloured so-called neuro soft drinks which claim to enhance mental activity—although he could well have endorsed neurophilosophy and neuroaesthetics. Neurolaw (“it wasn't me, it was my brain made me do it”) is impinging on judicial decisions, while last year the Wellcome Trust enhanced the prospects of neuroeducation by way of a £6 million grant.

In the USA, the Society for Neuroscience, founded a few years after the BRA, is now a mighty behemoth whose annual meetings attract up to 40 000 participants. Somewhat hubristically, the 1990s became the Decade of the Brain, and for at least some neuroscientists the first decade of this millennium was to be the Decade of the Mind. Despite the labels, neither mind nor brain had been solved by the end of these decades, and 2012 ushered in two giant initiatives, Europe's Human Brain Project and the US Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN). In 2014, the Japanese weighed in with their Brain/MINDS project—yet another tortured acronym, standing for Brain Mapping by Integrated Neurotechnologies for Disease Studies. The hopes are that pumping billions into “solving the brain” will both generate wealth and cure diseases from Alzheimer's to schizophrenia—although many neuroscientists remain sceptical.

What has driven this vast expansion? During the 1960s, biological psychiatry was in optimistic mode and pharmaceutical companies were busily hunting for new generations of psychotropic drugs to treat the growing numbers of those suffering from depression and anxiety. But for many of those of us entering the fledgling field, it was the sense that now the DNA double helix had “solved” genetics, the brain was biology's last great frontier. Had not the great Francis Crick moved on from DNA to neuroscience, claiming, as he did in The Astonishing Hypothesis, “You're nothing but a pack of neurons”? I shared this reductionism, even writing a book grandiosely called The Conscious Brain, a title I would now renounce, as in my older and hopefully wiser age, I recognise that it is people, not brains, who are conscious, albeit we need our brains to be so. But despite our optimism, “solving” the brain, or even “curing” mental and psychic distress, was then beyond our empirical or theoretical capacity.

Fast forward the half-century, and where are we now? Techniques inconceivable then have transformed neuroscience labs. Genes can be modified or novel ones inserted into mice, designed so that they can be turned on or off in specific brain regions at the experimenter's whim. The new imaging techniques make it possible to visualise processes from the movement of ions across the synapse to the coordinated activity of ensembles of many millions of neurons in the living brain. The false colour images of regions of the brain lighting up when taxi drivers navigate a virtual map of a city or a person empathises with another's pain have become familiar not just to researchers but to the wider public. Brain-computer interfaces to repair the injuries of age and accident, or even to enhance attention and memory, are being actively pursued—not least by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in response to the rising numbers of brain and mind-injured veterans returning from the USA's overseas wars. Whole new fields of research, such as social neuroscience, are developing around these technologies.

But many of the problems that had beset the early days remain unresolved. Neuroscience may be a singular label, but it embraces a plurality of disciplines. Molecular and cognitive neuroscientists still scarcely speak a common language, and for all the outpouring of data from the huge industry that neuroscience has become, Schmitt's hoped for bridging theories are still in short supply. At what biological level are mental functions to be understood? For many of the former, reductionism rules and the collapse of mind into brain is rarely challenged—there is even a society for “molecular and cellular cognition”—an elision hardly likely to appeal to the cognitivists who regard higher order mental functions as emergent properties of the brain as a system.

Many years before the term neuroscience was invented, the great neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington, who provided the abiding metaphor for the activities of the myriads of signals flashing through the cerebral cortex as “an enchanted loom”, at the end of his lifetime of research on the brain, doubted that it would ever be possible to make the leap from brain to mind. The instigators of Europe's Human Brain Project, whose metaphor for the brain is a computer—interestingly a technology in linear descent from the earliest of mechanical looms—concede that although the brain may indeed be “the world's most sophisticated information processing machine”, it operates on unknown principles “that seem to be completely different from those of conventional computers”.

Copyright © 2015 Jason Reed/Reuters/Corbis

Meantime, and—except to the theorists—more urgently, the prospects for improved therapies for the worldwide wave of psychiatric distress seem as distant as ever. The 1960s hopes for a biological psychiatry have faded in the absence of new drugs and there are few new insights. It is increasingly recognised that the phenomenology of the latest version of the psychiatrists' bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, can't readily be translated into the molecular language of disordered molecules. Now that the brain can no longer be conceptualised as a sea of neurotransmitters whose abnormalities are the causes of depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia, many big pharmaceutical companies are retreating to the safer terrains of cancer and coronary heart disease.

Just as half a century ago, it is an exciting and challenging time to be a neuroscientist. What's certain is that this year's BNA Festival of Neuroscience will have plenty to talk about. And as one who was there not only at the beginning of the BNA but also at the origins of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, I will be looking forward to this double celebration.

I was a founder member of the BRA/BNA and served on its early committees.