vor ten years ago, the largest and one of the most ambitious life science projects in the European Union to date was launched. The goal: to understand the human brain and simulate it in a supercomputer. With the research giants USA and China breathing down their necks, who also massively supported brain research, a thousand million – a billion – euros were promised. In addition to graphene research, the “EU flagship” should lead Europe into new, innovative worlds. In the end, 600 million euros were drawn from more than five hundred researchers at 155 universities, clinics and research centers; There are 3,000 publications to date. We asked the doctor Katrin Amunts, who led the Human Brain Project (HBP) since 2016 after a turbulent initial period and was also a professor in Düsseldorf and at the Jülich Research Center and a member of the German Ethics Council until 2020, what progress the giant project has made.
Ms. Amunts, have the great, sometimes exorbitant initial expectations of the brain project been fulfilled?
Overall, it has been a very successful project, even if you look at what will come of it. The goal was to contribute to a deeper understanding of the brain and to enable a new type of ICT-based neuroscience at the interface of neuroscience, medicine and computing, i.e. digital brain research based on computers and simulation. The project has become an important catalyst for this. With Ebrains, we have created a new research infrastructure that offers large amounts of data, models, simulation approaches and analysis tools and is already available to the research community for free use. The roadmap for the next decade of brain research is also an important result. Together with international researchers outside the project, we recently developed a vision for the next ten years of digital brain research. In a joint position paper with one hundred authors, we outline our common scientific goals and priorities.
A vision was announced at the start, namely being able to simulate the function of the brain. This is definitely not possible yet. Have you overreached yourself – an accusation that scientific brain research is constantly confronted with?
There was an understanding among the public that we would ultimately be able to simulate a human brain model down to the smallest detail. From my point of view, this was a very pointed idea that actually didn’t harmonize with the goals of the HBP right from the start. At that time, the role of simulation was on the one hand overemphasized and, on the other hand, oversimplified. What we mean by simulation today is more differentiated. A simulation is always about addressing a specific question. It is a mathematical tool, not an end in itself, so it should not be about completely simulating a single brain down to the smallest detail. What we have developed are various simulation approaches that we can now combine with each other and that help scientists answer certain questions and have even been able to be adopted in some cases in the clinic. We also simulate entire brains, but it is always a question of the level of detail.
For example?
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