Prism: Obama's Brain Initiative and RIP Jane Henson

[Burgold]

First link active... Scientists are beginning to unlock why certain bacteria like E Coli are so good at resisting antibiotics.

http://voicerussia.com/radio_broadcast/72430379/105811865.html

[Burgold]

Okay, the last two links for this week's show are up.

The first, I'm still not sure about even after conducting the interview. A professor from Brown looked into mindfulness (meditation) practices to study how real the effects are. She examined what happened in the brain while exercises were being done. I have to admit to feeling some cynicism about this and I know the literature is still a bit mixed. Interesting chat though...

http://voicerussia.com/radio_broadcast/72430379/105812455.html

The other is a chat with an actress who performs in Olney Theater's production of Spring Awakenings. It was a damn good show, but not for the kids as the musical dealt with teen suicide, abortion, simulated sex, and gun violence. The amazing thing is the original work was adapted from an 1890's German novel. I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.

http://voicerussia.com/radio_broadcast/72430379/105812611.html

[Burgold]

The National Parks, the Manhatten Project, our interstate highways, the Apollo Missions, the Human Genome Project every so often the government decides to do something big. Something that will have a legacy that will impact us for generations for good or ill.

On this week's show, I look at President Obama's BRAIN Initiative and ask does it fit the bill and is the timing right.

http://voicerussia.com/radio_broadcast/70924886/109708017.html

Then, an homage to Jane Henson.

Sometimes, you meet someone only once, but they still had a profound effect. I met Jane Henson about 7 years ago. Meeting the widow of Jim Henson was cool, but dangerous. After all, she was a muppeteer once too and I loved the Muppets as a kid. There's the threat that a cherished memory would be spoiled.

Here's a commentary I delivered on yesteday's show relaying that visit and why seven years later I still remember it in detail. Strangely, what I remember best is the knock on the door.

http://voicerussia.com/radio_broadcast/72430379/110020197.html

(Disclosure: New boss coming in this week or next and I'd really like to pump up the hits.)

[No Excuses]

I am excited about the BRAIN initiative. Good time to be involved in Neuroscience research.

[PeterMP]

I am excited about the BRAIN initiative. Good time to be involved in Neuroscience research.

There actually seems to be a good bit of criticism from people doing the neuroscience because of a lack of clear direction and purpose.

Do we really need to know how all of the neurons in the brain of firing and connected to cure/prevent alzhemiers and autism?

http://www.npr.org/2013/04/05/176303594/researchers-question-obamas-motives-for-brain-initiative

What is the real likely long term up side in terms of direct affects, but even indirect affects in terms of broadly applicable technology?

[No Excuses]

Do we really need to know how all of the neurons in the brain of firing and connected to cure/prevent alzhemiers and autism?

An additional $200M (counting both government and private investment) is a huge chunk. A bit early to speculate on where exactly the money will go but why is additional investment in research into a relatively unknown field a bad thing?

[PeterMP]

An additional $200M (counting both government and private investment) is a huge chunk. A bit early to speculate on where exactly the money will go but why is additional investment in research into a relatively unknown field a bad thing?

In this case, bad is conditional/context dependent.

Bad would mean inferior real world results with respect to putting the money to something else.

Why this and not epigentics (something else we don't really understand well), which would capture certain brain related research (autism and some drug addiction at least appears to be epigenetically related), but also human diseases like cancer, but potentially important non-human biology as well as as epigenetics are also important in plant biology (food crops) and the some eukaryotic parasites (so infectious disease research)?

And we could leave biology and talk about something like string theory, or we could even talk about more well developed fields, but things that would even have more broad impacts.

Something like super conductors, which would affect a wide host of related areas, including computers (and so then even neurobiology), energy, and transportation.

Or quantum computing.

This idea in of to itself isn't "bad", but in an era of limited resources does it make sense to focus a large amount of resources on a particular area w/o some real consideration of the likely real world upside as compared to other options.

I do think this particular endeavor does have pretty obvious ethical concerns and issues directly related to Burgold's other post and predicting human behavior.

Is a brain scan saying that somebody is likely to commit more crimes in the future someday going to be allowed evidence at something like a parole hearing?

What if any of the money is going to go to addressing those ethical issues?

Does it make sense for us to spend money to address/explore ethical issues we are going out of our way to create?

[Burgold]

We talked about that to a degree in both of the interviews I had on this subject this week.

Both scientists felt that the government has an important role to play in basic science and more, really only the government can do something this "big" On top of that, because the government doesn't have to please shareholders or grantors it allows them to pursue science more purely sometimes.

They also said with an aging population, the increasing numbers in the autism spectrum, and with certain advances of technology we are much closer to unlocking certain doors. Then again, they both did have a vested interest in this kind of research being pursued and funded.

[No Excuses]

In this case, bad is conditional/context dependent.

Bad would mean inferior real world results with respect to putting the money to something else.

Why this and not epigentics (something else we don't really understand well), which would capture certain brain related research (autism and some drug addiction at least appears to be epigenetically related), but also human diseases like cancer, but potentially important non-human biology as well as as epigenetics are also important in plant biology (food crops) and the some eukaryotic parasites (so infectious disease research)?

Fair enough, but a similar argument can be made for brain research. Whether it's a neurodevelopmental disorder like Autism or a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's, both affect a fair share of the population. Especially in the case of neurodegenerative disorders, which will only increase in numbers as life expectancy goes up for first world countries. And then other issues of mental health (depression for instance) which are also a growing problem in our population (and world wide). No denying that there is a PR element to this initiative, maybe even likely due to the mental health debate initiated by the recent mass shooting incidents. But say in comparison to the advances already made in cancer research, brain research is lagging behind quite a bit in our understanding of just how the brain functions, especially down at the molecular level.

As far as the ethics of advanced brain research, same can be said for genetics or even epigenetics. If they find a hereditary link for say tendency to violent behavior, either at the sequence level or inherited expression pattern level, how is that much different than a brain scan which may show a similar thing? Hasn't such research already come out through these fields; i.e inheritance of certain alleles of Monoamine Oxidase A which may predispose people to violent behavior.

[PeterMP]

We talked about that to a degree in both of the interviews I had on this subject this week.

Both scientists felt that the government has an important role to play in basic science and more, really only the government can do something this "big" On top of that, because the government doesn't have to please shareholders or grantors it allows them to pursue science more purely sometimes.

They also said with an aging population, the increasing numbers in the autism spectrum, and with certain advances of technology we are much closer to unlocking certain doors. Then again, they both did have a vested interest in this kind of research being pursued and funded.

If this were the prevent/cure autism initiaitve, I'd be all for it, but then you'd be funding research across fields, including epigenetic, environomental pollution, basic disease epidiemology (which might lead you to anything, including infectious disease), and research into early intervention (that seems pretty successful), and you'd have pretty discrete and obvioius goal like you did with the human genome, Apollo, and Manhatten project.

We should absolutely should be spending more money on autism.

Alzheimer's I'm less sure of because of the people that are most affected (i.e. people whose most productive time is clearly behind them) and the resulting likely societal impact.

And we know more about Alzhemier's, which means it is more in a place where the Pharma companies can take over. I would support long term epidemiology research on prevention.

---------- Post added April-6th-2013 at 02:05 PM ----------

Fair enough, but a similar argument can be made for brain research. Whether it's a neurodevelopmental disorder like Autism or a neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's, both affect a fair share of the population. Especially in the case of neurodegenerative disorders, which will only increase in numbers as life expectancy goes up for first world countries. And then other issues of mental health (depression for instance) which are also a growing problem in our population (and world wide). No denying that there is a PR element to this initiative, maybe even likely due to the mental health debate initiated by the recent mass shooting incidents. But say in comparison to the advances already made in cancer research, brain research is lagging behind quite a bit in our understanding of just how the brain functions, especially down at the molecular level.

As far as the ethics of advanced brain research, same can be said for genetics or even epigenetics. If they find a hereditary link for say tendency to violent behavior, either at the sequence level or inherited expression pattern level, how is that much different than a brain scan which may show a similar thing? Hasn't such research already come out through these fields; i.e inheritance of certain alleles of Monoamine Oxidase A which may predispose people to violent behavior.

1. As I already stated though there is more to them then neurobiology, and there is no guarantee that the most affective treatment/prevetion method is going go come from studying neurobiology vs. something like the disease epidemeology.

2. Yes, but that's the genetics of violent behavior. There are a lot of studies that can be done in epigenetics and genetics w/o touching violent behavior or behavior at all. In neurobiology, that is much less the case.

And completely irrelevant if we talk about something like super conductors.

**EDIT**

Part of the issue is that there is more focus on translational research, especially by the NIH (http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v11/n2/full/embor2009282.html). To take one area and say we are going to support more basic research in this area while pushing everything else to more translational reseach seems insincere and very potentially "bad".

[Riggo-toni]

Alzheimer's I'm less sure of because of the people that are most affected (i.e. people whose most productive time is clearly behind them) and the resulting likely societal impact.

And we know more about Alzhemier's, which means it is more in a place where the Pharma companies can take over. I would support long term epidemiology research on prevention.

I'm not certain, but haven't all the pharmalogical treatments for Alzheimer's been extremely limited in their effectiveness, if not abject failures. We can't even state definitively if amyloid plaque is the culprit, which everyone seemed convinced of just a few years ago. Yes, most Alzheimer patients' productive years are behind them, but the same cannot be said for their caretakers. My wife is now taking care of her 3rd grandparent with dementia, and it is adversely affecting her most productive years...not to mention her own mental health/well being.

We've blown $12B so far on high speed trains without so much as a single track going down. Obvious waste from the get-go.

This is one of the few Obama spending initiatives I'm fine with, (and I would be fine with most medical or scientific research provided the dispersion of its funds are immune from political influence . Certainly few could have seen the potential commercial applications with funds for things like Darpanet or GPS, but the return on our gov't investment was enormous. The same is likely to be true for DNA sequencing and such. Given that people are living longer than ever, and that 1/3 of people over 80 suffer from dementia, and that the baby boomer generation will begin hitting that threshold before too long.....

[PeterMP]

I'm not certain, but haven't all the pharmalogical treatments for Alzheimer's been extremely limited in their effectiveness, if not abject failures. We can't even state definitively if amyloid plaque is the culprit, which everyone seemed convinced of just a few years ago. Yes, most Alzheimer patients' productive years are behind them, but the same cannot be said for their caretakers. My wife is now taking care of her 3rd grandparent with dementia, and it is adversely affecting her most productive years...not to mention her own mental health/well being.

We've blown $12B so far on high speed trains without so much as a single track going down. Obvious waste from the get-go.

This is one of the few Obama spending initiatives I'm fine with, (and I would be fine with most medical or scientific research provided the dispersion of its funds are immune from political influence . Certainly few could have seen the potential commercial applications with funds for things like Darpanet or GPS, but the return on our gov't investment was enormous. The same is likely to be true for DNA sequencing and such. Given that people are living longer than ever, and that 1/3 of people over 80 suffer from dementia, and that the baby boomer generation will begin hitting that threshold before too long.....

1. I suspect that from a care provider perspective that curing Alzhemier's won't make much of a difference in reality. It is like preventative care, and it not saving money. Old people are going to get sick, they are going to need help, they are going to lose their hearing, eye sight, break bones and not have proper mobility, etc, and in the end they are going to get sick with something that kills them and they are going to need care during the process. You might shift the nature of the care needed and the time frame, but I doubt that making people live longer at the normal age that Alzhemeir's strike is giong to REALLY reduce the care needed (in some total and real manner), and certainly having them live longer is just going to mean more years of care (even if at reduced intensity).

2. And that's not even close what you see with respect to autism and not only loss by the care provider, but the person with autism too.

3. We already had other hypothesis for Alzheimeimers before the plaque one became more discredited (and to be clear it isn't clear that the plaques play no role, just that alll plaques aren't the primary cause), but an alternative/related (but not identical) idea that the tau protein plays a role go backs to the 1980s.

4. We also have a number of things that we already know are good risk factors, and we already have some medicines for Alzhiemers.

5. And there are more in clinicial trials.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s_disease_clinical_research

(Obama has spent a lot of money on "high speed rails" where the money went to improving track for the "slow" trains making the a little faster and more reliable.)

Dealing with autism is harder (life long for the person and the care providers), and we are much further away from understanding and having real treatments for the disease.

**EDIT**

And even if your objective is to cure Alzheimers there is no real reason to believe that this most effecient way. There's no reason to believe that funding that would cover multiple fields (again things like basic disease epidemology) wouldn't be a better approach.

[skinsmarydu]

My mom (an RN) got my dad on Aricept almost the very second she realized he was doing things that weren't "normal" for their routine.

Now, he has to keep a routine. It gets very testy if it varies even a small degree.

It hurts, a lot. Like when he can't remember who's in the SB...we've been lifelong Redskins fans, and he baptized me in my burgundy corduroys with a Redskins patch on the back pocket. He also took me to the '69 World Series, and when we moved south, bunches of Orioles games.

somebody please find a cure. He's 83...with a lot left. He gets around almost as well as I do, and I'd love another round of golf with him.

[Burgold]

My mom (an RN) got my dad on Aricept almost the very second she realized he was doing things that weren't "normal" for their routine.

Now, he has to keep a routine. It gets very testy if it varies even a small degree.

It hurts, a lot. Like when he can't remember who's in the SB...we've been lifelong Redskins fans, and he baptized me in my burgundy corduroys with a Redskins patch on the back pocket. He also took me to the '69 World Series, and when we moved south, bunches of Orioles games.

somebody please find a cure. He's 83...with a lot left. He gets around almost as well as I do, and I'd love another round of golf with him.

Yeah, my grandmother suffered from dimentia in her last years. The toll of her losing herself was heavy on both her and the family to the extent that we can lessen that and better quality of life I hope we do...

I know that's not what you are directly arguing against, Peter.

[PeterMP]

First, as somebody who lost their father about a year and half ago, not to dimentia, but quickly and completely unexpectedly from massive heat failure (which he had no high risk behavior or charcteristics for (surprsingly this happens relatively often and when they say high risk for men in their early 60's they REALLY mean high risk)), I can sympathize with wanting to have one more or one last anything with a parent, including a simple, but real heartfelt conversation or hug.

In addtion, as somebody who is 40 and has two young kids (7 and 3) and seeing the likely appearant quality of my genetics (as stated my dad has passed and all of my granparents died decades ago and none lived to be 70), I find the idea of illnesses of the elderly both frightening and depressing when I consider if my fate is similar to those that in my family that have gone before me (my mother is still alive, but she's only in her mid-60s)) and my kids wait as long to have kids as I did, I won't ever really know my grandchildren (as my father never really knew my kids).

However, I'm not sure those feelings are a good basis for constructing national or societal policies/goals.

I've come to believe that the federal goverment shouldn't directly fund translational or really applied research with respect to a marketable item through its traditional reseach funding methods (i.e. the NIH and NSF), which historically have been used to fund research, which is not likely to get funded through other methods (e.g. basic research and disease research related to prevention through lifestyle modification not drugs that would be patent protected).

We pay the costs TWICE for translational or applied research that results pretty directly in a marketable product, while the benefits are largely hidden and obscure, and therefore difficult to determine, quantitate, and evaluate.

We pay the costs because we pay for the research. However, the research is still patent protected and the relevant entities therefore still get periods of exclusitivity, which means we pay more.

I've written before (mostly to JMS), that this is essentailly a way for the federal government to help fund higher education, but two things have happened that have influenced my thinking:

1. More and more faculty at reserach level of institutions are getting lenient intellectual property clauses written into their contracts, which means in more cases more of the money is going to private entities and not the instituion of higher learning.

The net result is that the individual is profitting without taking as much (if any) of the risk that other private entities are (those that normally and historically move basic research to a marktable good), but they still benefit financially (i.e. they don't have to fund the research required for the transition to the marekt and put up as much of their money because the government is, but if it works out and there is a patent out of it they see a large financial gain).

2. As I've learned more about economics over the last 2 years, it has become appearant to me that more direct ways of affecting and modulating behavior are better and easier to understand and evaluate. If for example, we want to encourage translational research with respect to Alzheimers there would be several good more direct ways (e.g. low interest loans from the government for companies doing that kind of work, offer tax credits to companies doing that kind of work, and/or extended patent lifetimes for any FDA approved drugs) where it would be more simple to really understand the costs and cause and effects.

And as for funding Alzheimers research, if the federal government wants to fund higher education there are more direct and therefore clearer to understand and evaluate ways to do it.

At this point in time, I think our national funding priorities are being heavily influenced at the political level by people that have the most to gain from them (e.g. those that work at large research institutions in certain fields and are more likely to have looser personal intellectual property clauses and therefore that gain the most from patenting their work and translating it to a market). Today there is more of a situation where people that are getting wealthy through patents from the research funded by the federal goverenment have an influence on our funding priorties at a political level.

Simultaneously, three things have happened:

1. There is more emphasis on patenting in academia.

2. More people are directly benefiting from the private sector applications of their research carried out in academia.

3. The federal government research dollars are going to more applied and translational research, which benefits those that patent and are gain economically from anything that does transfer to the market if they like.

I don't think those three things are really a coincidence.

And George Church, who has been heavily involved in pushing this BRAIN initiative is one such person:

http://arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc/tech.html

(Note, I'm not saying that Church or anybody else is bad or doing anything wrong, but I don't think this is an ideal or really good sitation and certainly brings up slippery slope issues and issues with the appearance of impropriety, which IMO would be better if avoided at least in some aspects of federal reseach funding.)

[Burgold]

I hear ya, but I think I disagree slightly.

First, if we understand how the brain works and why/when it doesn't that opens up huge potentialities. Think about the crime study I did today. Think about ADHD, or cognitive or emotional disabilities, think of MS, Cerebral Palsy, and a host of other conditions. If we understand memory and learning better that would have ripples across all age spans and could beneficially change much.

Mind you, that also opens up tremendous ethical concerns. What alterations are appropriate? How much do we think we should ameliorate through psychopharmocology? What about really driving the locus of control through externals?

Still, the potential we get in solving a series of neurological diseases or dysfunctions is enormous and is worth investing in.

I think you raise an interesting question in that if you cast too wide a net that the lack of focus may not allow us to achieve what we want. I found it interesting that the person I interviewed didn't want to compare the BRAIN Project to the Human Genome Project, but rather to Eisenhauer's Interstate project.

Anyway, I like big dreams and I think big goals get you further then narrow ones. I guess though that that's the artist versus the scientist in me.

[alexey]

Besides standard concerns about keeping down waste, fraud, and abuse, I am all for us putting some resources into brain research.

Our souls are made of brain

[PeterMP]

I hear ya, but I think I disagree slightly.

First, if we understand how the brain works and why/when it doesn't that opens up huge potentialities. Think about the crime study I did today. Think about ADHD, or cognitive or emotional disabilities, think of MS, Cerebral Palsy, and a host of other conditions. If we understand memory and learning better that would have ripples across all age spans and could beneficially change much.

Mind you, that also opens up tremendous ethical concerns. What alterations are appropriate? How much do we think we should ameliorate through psychopharmocology? What about really driving the locus of control through externals?

Still, the potential we get in solving a series of neurological diseases or dysfunctions is enormous and is worth investing in.

I think you raise an interesting question in that if you cast too wide a net that the lack of focus may not allow us to achieve what we want. I found it interesting that the person I interviewed didn't want to compare the BRAIN Project to the Human Genome Project, but rather to Eisenhauer's Interstate project.

Anyway, I like big dreams and I think big goals get you further then narrow ones. I guess though that that's the artist versus the scientist in me.

And this gets back to my point before. I can do that for all sort of things in terms of listing importances. Why not epigentics, which touches on many human health concerns, including those related to the brain like autism, drug addiction, MS, but also others like cancer and the evolution of some infectious eukaryotes, but also plant biology (which you could talk about having real affects in terms of agriculture).

Why not an effort of sequence epigenomes from some large number of organisms from different species?

What about bio-imaging in general?

Which would have a larger scale impact in terms of the people (i.e. labs) involved in the work AND who would be affected by the data output in the future.

I'm doing work on evolution (looking at rates of non-synonomous mutation rates for different parts of proteins). The human genome benefits me because I can use the human genome in my analysis even though I wasn't involved in any of the original research.

Maybe (but doubtfully), humans will be different than the other organisms I analyze data from, and I'll land on the cover of Science or Nature.

This objective seems as if its going to be directed to funding that will go to a limited number of labs and will then longer term benefit a limited number of labs in terms of the data produced. Even to people that I talk to at R01 schools (which I'm not), this at least appears to give a certain sub-set of labs a boost in basic research dollars at a time when the NIH is saying it doesn't have much money for research period and more of its emphasis is on translational research so even less money to basic research.

I'm not saying that funding this is bad in of to itself, but at a time when a lot of people at R01 schools that have been doing pretty basic NIH funded research for years are losing their funding (or seeing a decrease in their funding by getting fewer grants), this seems like an odd choice.

I know somebody that works on an infectious eukaryote doing pretty basic research that once had 2 NIH grants, but is now done to 1 and is worried about losing that one, where if this was a large scale epigenetic program could apply for funding through it and even if they didn't get it could apply some of the resulting data to their work, which might help them keep/get funding in the future.

I know people in plant biology that are in similar situations.

And this doesn't even get into the non-bio fields.

I generally don't think focus at the political level is probably a good idea because the reasons for the focus tend to be political and therefore not connected to real world or practical out comes. In general, I'd like to see as wide a net cast as possible. I understand for political reasons why it might be useful in terms of public support to need a particular "goal" to gain public support, but this seems awfully narrow.

**EDIT**

The national highway system had a discrete goal (connect the different parts of the country) for practical reasons (mostly national security for Eisehower I believe).

This is not a cure autism or alzheimers initiative. At least at this time, this appears to be dump a bunch money into this one pretty basic research area that might then help with these out comes (autism and alzheimers), while ignoring pretty obvious ethical concerns that are also likely to come up (those that you have raised).

I don't really think they are that comparable.