Controversial Human Brain Project secures 3-year European Commission funding

The controversial Human Brain Project (HBP) has secured funding from the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, for the next three years that amounts to an annual investment of €89 million.

The HBP is an ambitious 10-year multidisciplinary research project that was launched in October 2013 with the aim to understand the human brain and develop new treatments to manage and cure brain disorders. The €1-billion project is largely funded by the European Union and involves hundreds of researchers from 26 countries.

Since its launch, however, the project has been embroiled in problems. Less than a year after its launch, the researchers involved felt that the goal and the scientific scope of the HBP were becoming diffused. Therefore, 150 neuroscientists signed an open letter addressed to the European Commission, condemning the project’s “overly narrow approach” and the exclusion of “an entire neuroscience subproject and the consequent deletion of 18 additional laboratories.” They also expressed concern over the lack of transparency in the handling of the project and threatened to boycott it unless these concerns were addressed. Following this, several reforms were made to the HBP, including the establishment of an independent mediation committee to address the problems pointed out in the open letter.

The latest development in the HBP is that on October 30, the European Commission signed an agreement stating that it would finance the project for the next three years and that it plans to start “a process to change the project’s legal status so as to spread responsibility across many participating institutions.”

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While the commission has signed the deal to restore the researchers’ confidence in the project, some researchers involved in the HBP remain unsure of its course. Yves Frégnac, director of the CNRS Unit of Neuroscience, Information and Complexity in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, says, “The mediation report was a very important step, but it is much too early to evaluate its impact. We are still sceptical.”

The enterprising project has a vision of becoming an international organization with a permanent infrastructure along the lines of Europe's particle-physics laboratory, CERN, and the European Spallation Source in Sweden. Wolfgang Marquardt, director of the Jülich Research Centre and chair of the project’s mediation committee, sums up the HBP’s next important milestone saying, “The challenge for the HBP will now be to regain scientific and public confidence with undiminished effort.” While the HBP seems to have taken steps toward realizing its mission, whether it becomes successful in attaining it remains to be seen.