WHAT a headache for the Human Brain Project. Over 300 of Europe’s neuroscientists have signed an open letter threatening to boycott the €1.2 billion endeavour to simulate all the brain’s connections within 10 years.
It was launched last year as a collaboration involving institutions in 26 countries. But after funding for the cognitive research arm was cut, tensions came to a head over the scope of the work.
“The project was sold to us as a huge push to understand how the brain works, and there is now no basic or experimental science left in it,” says Alexandre Pouget, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. “What’s left is just a technology project.”
The signatories want the European Commission to re-evaluate the project’s funding.
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This article appeared in print under the headline “No brainer”
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