After 5 years of planning and debate, China has finally launched its ambitious contribution to neuroscience, the China Brain Project.
After 5 years of planning and debate, China has finally launched its ambitious contribution to neuroscience, the China Brain Project . Budgeted at 5 billion yuan under the latest 5-year plan, the CBP will likely get additional money under future plans, putting it in the same league as the U.S. Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, which awarded $2.4 billion in grants through 2021, and the EU Human Brain Project, budgeted at $1.3 billion.
The acrimony continued. The money will be shared among 11 designated centers and about 50 research groups selected by an organizing committee that Poo heads. Neurobiologist Yi Rao, president of Capital Medical University, toldall 11 selected institutes are represented on the committee, which creates conflicts of interest.
Now, Luo’s team plans to do the same for the macaque brain, which is 200 times bigger, aiming to produce a “mesoscale connectome”—something like a wiring diagram. The effort will complement new brain-mapping programs under the BRAIN Initiative, says the initiative’s director, John Ngai of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. He and Poo are discussing cooperation.
Logothetis, who declined an interview request, is unlikely to have similar problems in China. “There is some but not a lot of concern about animals used in research, but there is no animal rights group focusing on this area,” says Deborah Cao, an animal law and welfare expert at Griffith University, Nathan. Still, Chinese researchers are striving to “replace, reduce, and refine” animal experiments, says Ji Dai, a neuroscientist at CAS’s Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology.