Stanford's latest brainchild

Fall 2007 Interaction

Adding “neuro” to your research appears to be a savvy move. There’s neurotechnology and neuroethics and neuroeconomics and neurolaw. Pictures of the brain, it is said, can show us why we kill, why we like Bach, why we construct stories the way we do and why we choose the wrong boyfriends. And very precise images of the brain hold out the promise of very precise tinkering.

Articles about this phenomenon are in daily newspapers and popular magazines and on websites. There are claims of mind-reading and self-rewiring. The website Slate reported recently on the year’s top five neuroscience achievements, each with brilliant and horrifying applications. Maybe it all started when George H. W. Bush in July 1990 proclaimed the next 10 years to be “the decade of the brain.”

Why has the brain become so popular? “Because people have realized they have one,” responds William Mobley, founding director of the Neuroscience Institute at Stanford (NIS). “They’ve realized that everything that matters is going on in the brain. And the how explains the why: Why do I like this music and not that music? Why me?”

That last question, common to most human beings, got Mobley, the John E. Cahill Family Professor in the School of Medicine, into neuroscience to begin with. The field is an amalgam of neurology, molecular biology, cognitive psychology, genetics, electrophysiology and biochemistry, among others. Cognitive neuroscience, which lies at the intersection of psychology and neurology, looks at the more ethereal, less physical aspects of the brain’s activity.

This fall, classes about the brain are being given in about a dozen departments at the schools of Engineering, Medicine, Education, and Humanities and Sciences.

Translational mission

One of five institutes at the School of Medicine, NIS is in the midst of a campaign to realize its vision of synthesizing molecules and mind, analysis and application, and science and society—essentially the translational vision of the medical school often repeated by Dean Philip Pizzo. Starting with disease, this initiative—for the time being called “Neuro-X”—will build outward, incorporating an ever-widening field of experts.

“We want to do things no department could do,” Mobley said last summer. “So we’re going from science to medicine to society, and that’s what it’s all about, that’s what it should be. No department can do that. We’re creating a palette of many, many colors.”

Brian Wandell, another leader at NIS, and also co-chair of the Stanford Initiative on Human Health and current chair of the Department of Psychology, is similarly enthused about NIS and the array of possibilities. There are nearly 80 faculty members, representing some 15 departments in five of Stanford’s seven schools, teaching some aspect of neuroscience.

“The NIS has the broadest representation of any of the institutes of medicine,” he said. “Scientists from engineering, H&S and medicine are all deeply involved in neuroscience research, and they all see problems from different points of view. Each feels strongly that their work is important, and each one advocates for more resources to train more students. And they’re all right.

“I’ve been at Stanford for 30 years, and the expectation here is that people get along and help each other. By and large, it works.”

The NIS plan calls for five clusters: the Program in Neural Circuit Control, devoted to the molecular and cellular basis for circuit formation, function and learning; the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, where people from varied disciplines will work together on shared imaging instruments; the Center for the Mind, Brain and Computation, devoted to bridging the gap between the theoretical and experimental sides of brain research; the Program for Translational Neuroscience, which will study malfunction and repair; and the Center on the Brain and Society, which will emphasize neuroethics, education, decision-making and law.

In other words, from the microscopic to the societal. And one day, if Neuro-X leaders have their way, all these researchers will share space.

Essential collaboration

But until then, they have to walk from department to department, which has its own advantages. Mobley said, for example, that he has been speaking with researchers at the School of Education and the Graduate School of Business about collaborative projects on Down syndrome, his field of expertise. The groups working on autism and Parkinson’s disease call upon psychologists, biochemists, electrical engineers and physicists to better understand the workings of the brain; one such collaborator was Steve Chu, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997 and is now the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Mobley was instrumental in bringing the Dalai Lama to Stanford in 2005, when the School of Medicine hosted a daylong dialogue among neuroscientists, Buddhist scholars and the community. The point was not to apply Buddhist philosophy to science or vice versa, he told the audience then, but to find those places where they overlapped and to find the common ground between two admittedly different cultures.

“Neuroscientists think in terms of writing papers,” Mobley said, reflecting back on that encounter. “Scientists think they can measure everything; but I have an open mind—literally.” When he tried to set up what he calls the Compassion Project, inspired by the Dalai Lama’s visit—“talk about collaboration!”—several colleagues brushed him off, he said. But he knew it was the right thing to do, he said, and he is moving ahead.

But along with compassion, some would argue there is also potential trouble; among the most talked-about neuroscientific developments are human enhancement, cloning, genetic tinkering and criminal verdicts without the bother of a trial. Such possibilities might promise liberation, but they might also offer the means for ethical abuses and human rights violations.

“Sometimes I think we’re like atomic physicists in the 1920s,” Mobley said. “Within a few years, something is going to happen with this technology. But I think neuroscientists can prevent abuses. If we have the tools, we’ll use them. You can’t prevent tool-making. The most transformative thing in the world right now is neuroscience. It will transform our world like nothing else.”