Personally I think the HBP is a cool idea. Only time will tell what the results will be...but isn't that the whole point of scientific exploration??
After reading the post and the article I did a little followup searching.
I found this interesting article from the 22 February 2012 issue of Nature: Computer modelling: Brain in a box : Henry Markram wants €1 billion to model the entire human brain. Skeptics don't think he should get it.
Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers about Markram's controversial proposal for the Human Brain Project (HBP) — an effort to build a supercomputer simulation that integrates everything known about the human brain, from the structures of ion channels in neural cell membranes up to mechanisms behind conscious decision-making.
Markram, a South-African-born brain electrophysiologist who joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) a decade ago, may soon see his ambition fulfilled. The project is one of six finalists vying to win €1 billion (US$1.3 billion) as one of the European Union's two new decade-long Flagship initiatives.
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As the response at the meeting made clear, however, there is deep unease about Markram's vision. Many neuroscientists think it is ill-conceived, not least because Markram's idiosyncratic approach to brain simulation strikes them as grotesquely cumbersome and over-detailed. They see the HBP as overhyped, thanks to breathless media reports about what it will accomplish. And they're not at all sure that they can trust Markram to run a project that is truly open to other ideas.
“We need variance in neuroscience,” declared Rodney Douglas, co-director of the Institute for Neuroinformatics (INI), a joint initiative of the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Given how little is known about the brain, he said, “we need as many different people expressing as many different ideas as possible” — a diversity that would be threatened if so much scarce neuroscience research money were to be diverted into a single endeavour.
Some good history, commentary, criticism, diagrams, and a video at the
link.
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