THE ALLEN HUMAN BRAIN ATLAS. The most important science event of the week has got to be the Allen Institute’s release of the complete Human Brain Atlas, which it described as “the world’s first anatomically and genomically comprehensive human brain map.” The potential fallout from this very ambitious, very expensive project from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is hard to overstate.
Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex excerpts a piece on the Atlas he did for Wired in 2009. The post also includes a brief Q&A with Allan Jones, the Institute’s CEO, who describes how the data (and brain samples) were collected. The most intriguing datum is this one: more than 82% of human genes are expressed in the brain. And lest we get too swelled-headed about this statistic, it’s about the same as in the mouse. (The Institute released its mouse brain atlas in 2006.) Jones expects the earliest impacts to come in two fields: genetics and drug development. For its next trick, he says, the Institute is tackling the wiring of the mouse brain.
At Technology Review. Emily Singer describes the project, quotes from the press release, and accompanies her post with arresting graphics from the Institute. At the Great Beyond, Ewen Callaway describes it too, noting that last month the Institute hired Cal Tech’s Christof Koch as chief scientific officer.
This is a Big Deal. Koch’s field is the neuroscience of consciousness, and he is noteworthy in part because he collaborated with Francis Crick, of DNA fame, who moved into that field for his last act. Koch’s view of the Institute’s next act differs somewhat from Jones’s; he told Callaway last month:
The idea is to focus on one or two behaviors — how we see, for instance, or smell, or remember — and ask how the relevant information is encoded, represented and transformed to give rise to behavior … the time is right to bring all these resources to bear onto a single question, not 20 questions in 10 different animals, each behaving differently. You essentially build a brain observatory where you try to study one behavior exhaustively across the brain, and you make the data available to other people.
At the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, Katherine Hobson zeroes in on a fact that other discussions didn’t emphasize: the Atlas’s human brain data come from only two human brains, and both of them belonged to men. (A woman’s brain is, however, to be part of the study’s next phase.) When Hopson asked Jones why no women, he told her one reason is that husbands apparently don’t want to donate a wife’s brain to science. Wives are not so reluctant. (That’s presumably the reason the hed on this piece reads “Take My Husband’s Brain — Please!”)
On average, there was 94% similarity in gene expression between the two brains. So at this stage, Jones said, the fact that the brains are the same sex doesn’t matter much because the researchers are most interested in how alike the brains are, not their differences.
I can’t help wondering if that emphasis on similarities rather than differences isn’t in part political, stressing as it does the biological oneness of the human species. I have wondered the same thing about the hypothesis, well supported by data, that Homo sap came into being just once, in Africa. I hasten to add — emphatically — that I’m not for a moment arguing that these things are untrue. But, in these contentious times, they are also handy.
LANGUAGE IS OUT OF AFRICA TOO. As it happens, there’s another paper, just out in Science, that also makes the case for the human brain’s universality, if a bit indirectly. It argues that human language, like humans themselves, arose only once, in Africa.
As Blair Bolles points out at Babel’s Dawn, the paper draws an analogy between genes and phonemes. In a complex series of statistical manipulations, it shows that, like genes, phoneme diversity is highest in Africa and becomes less diverse as people move far from that continent. In fact, reduced phoneme diversity follows the pathways of human migration around the globe. The paper argues that language appeared sometime between 80.000 and 160,000 years ago, which tracks the archaeological appearance of evidence of symbolic culture in Africa.
Razib Khan also has a brief comment at Gene Expression. He cautions:
It isn’t as if everything published in Science is really quite as firm as outsiders might assume. This is a huge finding if valid. But extraordinary claims need to be met with caution.
MONEY FOR SCIENCE. Looks as if that 2011 US budget agreement cobbled together by the warring Washington politicians last week will pass. Science Insider has several pieces this week detailing how the science-related agencies fared, and the bottom line is that they suffered less than most. Given the general slashfest — and the bloodbath to come — this is pretty interesting. Apparently even some of the folks most determined to shrink the government by starving it have bought into the argument that research pays off. Or maybe they were so concentrated on saving the big bucks by defunding Planned Parenthood that they simply failed to pay attention. Find details below.
Research survives in the 2011 budget after an earlier scare.
The deal spares NIH major cuts.
NASA science budget holds steady.
Budget leaves applied energy research relatively unscathed.
Energy department’s national labs avoid major disruptions
The exception, of course, was the Environmental Protection Agency. But even there, research did better than other sections of EPA.
THE BRAINS OF CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS. Speaking of politics brings us right back to the brain, in this case the political brain, enshrined in that Current Biology paper reporting differences in brain structure between liberals and conservatives. Not only did the paper argue that, as the Neurocritic put it, “Liberals are conflicted and conservatives are afraid,” it had an incredibly juicy fillip that put it over the top in generating media interest: one of the authors is Colin Firth.
Yeah, that Colin Firth.
There are many reasons to tiiptoe warily around this study. Most important from the standpoint of public enthrallment, as even Firth et al. acknowledge, this paper is a truly splendid example of the cause-correlation problem. These findings, even if true, say absolutely nothing about whether certain brain arrangements lead to certain political attitudes or are a consequence of them. There are probably journalists able to resist this luscious concatenation of controversy and celebrity tricked out as Science. But not many, and in any case their editors would succumb immediately.
The Neurocritic discussion is deep and wide and pretty devastating. Another triumph for blogging as peer review. The post also tells us something of how and why this research happened (the genesis was a BBC program, which should give you some idea). Also how and why Colin Firth is a co-author. Additional lovely gossipy details are to be had from Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks, who also covers the well-known neuroscientist Natalie Portman, another Oscar winner.
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