Q&A: How the Brain Activity Map Came Together

It was a single tweet. On 12 February, after US President Barack Obama made a subtle nod to a new neuroscience project in his annual State of the Union address, Francis Collins, director of the country’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), posted on the @NIHDirector Twitter feed: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.” Instantly, scientists were buzzing with rumors that the Brain Activity Map could be the next moon shot, with a budget and timeline similar to the Human Genome Project.The brain map began as a brief white paper and has grown into a large—and still largely undefined—collaboration of several government agencies, nonprofit foundations and private companies. As the stakeholders describe in a commentary slated to published later this month, the goal of the initiative is to understand how thousands of neurons work in concert to control behavior and trigger disease. Miyoung Chun, vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California, has been developing the project since the beginning and is the self-described “glue” between its many diverse stakeholders. Chun (pictured) spoke with Virginia Hughes about the evolution of the project and what it might mean for biomedicine.Read more at...Nature Medicine, March 2013.