Obama puhui tyhjiä ja tylsiä hölynpölytieteilijöiden pippaloissa

Obaman suhteellisen lupaavasti alkaneet (aikaisempaan verraten) hommat lähtivät menemään läskiksi tästä:

Obama ja R. Douglas Fields napit vastakkain aivotutkimusstrategiasta:
https://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-map-the-other-brain-1.13654

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.13654!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/501025a.pdf

” Nature | Comment

Neuroscience: Map the other brain

R. Douglas Fields

04 September 2013

Glia, the non-neuronal cells that make up most of the brain, must not be left out of an ambitious US mapping initiative, says R. Douglas Fields.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative announced by US President Barack Obama in April seeks to map and monitor the function of neu- ral connections in the entire brains of experimental animals, and eventually in the human cerebral cortex.

Several researchers have raised doubts about the project, cautioning that map-ping the brain is a much more complex endeavour than mapping the human genome, and its usefulness more uncertain.

I believe that exploring neural networks and developing techniques with which to do so are important goals that should be vigorously supported.

But simply scaling up current efforts to chart neural connections is unlikely to deliver the promised benefits – which include understanding perception, consciousness, how the brain produces memories, and the development of treatments for diseases such as epilepsy, depression and schizophrenia1.

A major stumbling block is the project’s failure to consider that although the human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons it contains billions more non-electrical brain cells called glia.

These reside outside the neuronal ’connectome’ and operate beyond the reach of tools designed to probe electrical signalling in neurons.

Dismissed as connective tissue when they were first described in the mid-1800s, glia have long been neglected in the quest to understand neuronal signalling.

Research is revealing that glia can sense neuronal activity and control it.

Various studies also indicate that glia operate in diverse mental processes, for instance, in the formation of memories.They have a central role in brain injury and disease, and they are even at the root of various disorders – such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s – previously presumed to be exclusively neuronal. That the word ’glia’ was not uttered in any of the announcements of the BRAIN Initiative, nor written any-where in the ’white papers’ published in 2012 and 2013 in prominent journals outlining the ambitious plan, speaks volumes about the need for the community of neuroscientists behind the initiative to expand its thinking.

All major glial cell types in the brain – oligodendrocytes, microglia and astrocytes – communicate with each other and with neurons by using chemical neurotransmitters and gap junctions, channels that permit the direct transfer between cells of ions and small molecules (see ‘Roles of glial cells’). .. ”