ROUND THREE: BRAIN Power

On July 14th, Charlie Rose and Eric Kandel led a panel discussion involving four of the neuroscientists who've been charged with leading our nation's new BRAIN Initiative. Here's some of what was said -- slightly paraphrased here and there -- that may be of special significance to the CP community. I've embedded the full video recording at bottom.

Participants: Eric Kandel [EK] of Columbia University, Thomas Insel [TI] of the National Institute of Mental Health, Story Landis [SL] of the National Institute of Health, Cornelia Bargmann [CB] of Rockefeller University and William Newsome [WN] of Stanford University.

EK: 

The overall purpose of the Initiative is to understand the normal human brain, but it's inconceivable that studying it wouldn't have fantastic spin-offs for things like Alzheimer's...   (and CP; which he didn't mention explicitly, but implied)

It'll take fifty to one hundred years for us to have a complete understanding of the human brain.

At every point, we're going to make progress -- which will ultimately benefit clinical neurology.

Ten to twenty years from now we'll be at a different level from where we are now, in terms of the treatments for neurological disorders that are available.

TI: 

The Initiative is not about entirely solving the problem of understanding the brain, it's about developing the tools to help us address it in new ways. It's about developing the next generation of tools to help the science flourish even more. 

I believe deeply that disorders of the mind can be understood biologically -- as circuit problems -- and that this project could ultimately give us the tools with which to improve diagnosis and develop new treatments. And that would be transformative.

WN:

It's about being able to make wiser recommendations to NIH (National Institutes of Health) about where to invest to really drive things forward. 

It's about developing tools to allow us to identify and treat different disease states much more specifically than we currently can.

A key exchange:

Charlie Rose: Help me understand, too: There's not a focus in this initiative on understanding diseases of the brain? 

EK: Not a direct focus. 

CB: Let's try and figure out enough about the brain in general, its groundwork, and use it to apply to all brain disorders it might be relevant to. We're trying to turn on lights here that will illuminate the broad realm of brain disorders (be they degenerative, developmental, or psychiatric) and the normal brain.

Ending on the most optimistic of notes --

SL: 

I think there are likely to be early wins for neurological disorders. 

With regard to epilepsy, we will get out of these studies a better way to assess circuit activity...which would allow us to predict when a seizure is coming and stop it before it begins.

In the next five or more years, work stemming from the Initiative will have some practical application to diseased brains.

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