Breaking News! « Six Degrees of Paul Allen

Breaking News (that is just too cool to miss)

Q: What is Microsoft Co-founder, Paul Allen’s connection to a mouse?

(No, it’s not “that thing you click,” and it’s not his friend Laura Harring’s role in the movie, “Willard”)………………

So, what is it?

A: Remember when I told you about James Watson–the guy who won the
Nobel Peace Prize for discovering the structure of DNA and who is right
now a Senior Advisor to Paul Allen’s Institute for Brain Science?

Well, apparently Watson has just made lightning strike twice.

The Brain Institute has unveiled a complete, 3-D map of the brain of a mouse. It’s all available free to the public at http://www.brain-map.org/welcome.do

So why is an atlas of the brain of a mouse so important? It sounds
pretty creepy, but it’s actually a really important medical breakthrough because mice and men share 90% of the same kinds of genes, and so often brain research is conducted using mice.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003275752_brain26m.html

What that means is that medical researchers can take the Brain
Institute’s findings and build their own ideas on top of them, getting
that much closer to finding cures for diseases of the mind such as autism, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

And apparently this discovery is big—really big.

See… http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2006/sept/09-27-06-brain-atlas

It’s such a breakthrough discovery that Allen’s Brain Atlas has been
touted as doing for the brain what Watson’s Human Genome Project did for
DNA.

http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/James_Dewey_Watson.html

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/archive/news.shtml

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2494866&page=1

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6145629

A few years ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland,

Paul Allen asked the question, “Does secrecy harm scientific progress?”

_______________________________________

See: Tim O’Reilly’s Webblog, February 10, 2002

“Paul Allen , who came to the session, asked a key question but didn’t get a satisfactory response. He wanted to hear about intellectual property issues — in particular, if I understood his question, whether the growing secrecy in science is harming progress. Science is supposed to be about sharing data, not hoarding it. Not anymore, and that’s an alarming trend.”

___________________________________
It’s a big debate because today ideas themselves are the new
commodities, and people like fellow Microsoft Alum Nathan Myhrvold trade
them like stocks.

(See: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_27/b3991401.htm).

An argument can be made that secrecy protects an important
investment–that the money for research wouldn’t be provided without
some corresponding profit, but it is a big problem when it comes to
advancing scientific progress, because breakthroughs tend to come from
the collaboration of ideas–in other words, you have to invent the wheel
before you can build a car.

Paul Allen’s answer to his own question about secrecy and progress comes as a $40 million dollar Christmas present–he’s giving the findings from
his research away–gratis.

The results of millions of dollars worth of research by some of the top
minds in the field, can be freely accessed by the public at
http://www.brain-map.org/welcome.do

Companies specializing in medical research will certainly benefit from
the information, but the true beneficiaries are ultimately the people
who suffer from Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimers and other disorders of the mind, and who are now that much closer to receiving a cure.

Just as Crick and Watson’s double helix resulted in far
more scientific discovery than anyone could have imagined, so there is far more to
this current research breakthrough than meets the eye.

In addition to curing diseases of the mind, if you use your imagination,
this knowledge could end up resulting in some really Sci Fi futuristic
possibilities.

It’s either really cool or really scary when you think about it;).

But whatever else happens, serious kudos to Paul Allen for answering his
own question in a way that’s good for everybody.

This is the third lightning strike for Allen, who has played an integral
role in at least 3 of the major scientific breakthroughs of this
century: technology, space travel and now medicine.

I’ve really got to find out where he’s been keeping that obelisk….

neubrain Says:

October 29, 2006 at 8:14 pm

Common misconceptions about the Allen Brain Atlas:
http://braintechsci.blogspot.com/2006/10/paul-allen-brain-atlas-misconceptions.html

within6degrees Says:

October 30, 2006 at 2:08 pm

Hey, thanks Neubrain for your comment! I have been reading your blog for a long time and it is very interesting!
I have more to say, but I have to run off to work—I’ll come back later to address your comment, o.k.?
Thanks so much again for writing!

October 31, 2006 at 4:34 am

Hi, Neubrain! First of all, I really appreciate your commenting here and
I hope you come back again!

As I said, I have been reading your blog for awhile now and I get from
the many posts you’ve written about the Brain Institute and the Allens
in particular that Paul and Jody are not your favorite people
in the whole world:-).

You did make the statement in one of your earlier posts that “Paul Allen made a commendable step to advance neuroscience by mapping gene expression throughout the brain” and I agree with you there.

But I think that with some of your other criticisms you are being a little harsh. See this article from Time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1541235,00.html

“Posted Sunday, Oct. 1, 2006
When Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen heard about the plan to map the entire human genome—all 3 billion base pairs—he was duly impressed. And inspired. What if the same approach were applied to the most daunting frontier in biology—the human brain? “It’s incredibly fascinating,” says Allen. “We know so little about how the brain really works.”
So in 2002 he gathered together some of the nation’s leading brain experts and asked them what they needed to accelerate their research. An atlas, they said, would be very helpful, one that detailed all the genes that are active in the human brain.
A problem immediately arose. Making such a map would require a dependable source of fresh human brain tissue, something even Paul Allen’s money couldn’t buy. Mice, however, are plentiful. And because mice and men share 90% of their genes, the mouse brain made a pretty good stand-in. So in 2003, Allen created the Allen Institute for Brain Science with $141 million of his own money and launched the mouse-brain genome as its first project.
That project was completed last week, and a digitized index of the more than 21,000 genes active in the brain of a mouse was posted on the Web. Available at no charge to researchers—and anyone else who wants to see it, at brainatlas.org—it provides detailed cellular and molecular descriptions of the genes and their products as well as interactive, three-dimensional views that allow scientists to see where in the brain certain genes are active.”

It seems to me that the completion of a project of that magnitude is something to celebrate, whether or not there are other brain map projects out there as well.

Whether the map of a mouse brain is “epoch-making” I don’t
know, but I do know that it advances medical science and gets us that
much closer to finding cures for diseases of the brain.

I also know that Paul Allen could have spent the last twenty years
sipping Mai Tai’s by the pool instead of investing in projects that make
the world a better place and spending billions trying to help other
people. You’ve got to admire his intentions, if nothing else.

And you’ve got to admit that with all of the secrecy in medical science
and all of the money to be made from these discoveries, the fact that he
is offering the results of that expensive research for free is extremely
generous.

I also think it was necessary to announce the completion of the project so that the researchers who could benefit from this information would know where to find it.

I guess the bottom line here is that I just admire the heck out of what
Mr. Allen is doing–the money he’s put into new discoveries, and all of
the effort and hard work he and his sister Jo Allen Patton have put
into their charitable projects. They didn’t have to do any of this you
know?

Again I really do appreciate your writing here, and I imagine that you agree with me on at least a few of the things I’ve said, even though I know we have a difference of opinion about some of the other things. I really do enjoy reading your blog and I hope you visit mine again soon!:-)Thanks again for your comments!