Thread by @BellecGuill

This movie about the @HumanBrainProj is well done but thousands of PhDs (like me) were funded with this ~1B grant and never worked on Markram's Human Brain Simulation.

Here is my perspective on what truly happened inside this gigantic European research program 🧵 1/12

https://twitter.com/In_Silico_Film/status/1570251683673870336

The EU decided 10 years ago to fund massive Flagship projects. Research grants worth a billion are extremely rare in Europe.

Out of the first call two proposals got funded: The Human Brain Project (HBP) and Graphene.

The HBP started in 2013.
digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/activities/…

Henry Markam was the first director and public figure of HBP. He pitched the entire HBP around what he had done for a while (see TED 2009) but the detailed HBP proposal was divided in many work packages mostly disconnected from Markram's idea.
ted.com/talks/henry_ma…

Although many associate the HBP to Henry Makram, he left the project early on after the controversy around his Human Brain simulation. His most prominent publication as a HBP leader appeared in 2015 and was mainly funded before the HBP started.
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

So what is the HBP truly about?

Human brain imaging,
Mouse brain physiology,
Neuroscience theory,
Infrastructure for neuro-informatics,
Robotics,
Medical research,
Experimental neuromorphic computers,
And more.

See:
humanbrainproject.eu/en/about-hbp/h…

Through out 10 years of research terminating in 2023, there were many achievements, resulting in tones of publications.

See the highlights on the HBP website
humanbrainproject.eu/en/science-dev…

Or this overview from Katrin Amunts who is the scientific director:
eneuro.org/content/9/2/EN…

Was the HBP a success?

Certainly the money was not wasted! Researchers have worked hard and many publications came out.

A harder question is to know whether the outcome is more valuable than with other European grants like ERC which is small sized.

From my HBP funded PhD, roughly 1 every 4 papers was a HBP collaboration. So I would say it did not change research dynamics compared to regular grants.

I think the main difference was that group leaders had to play with interal HBP politics instead of writing grant proposals.

Sadly, HBP did not become like NASA or CERN since we we have not seen a product like the James Webb telescope of the Brain.

HBP knows it, so they launched EBRAINS
@HBPHighPerfComp but imo it's a collection of papers/softwares/datasets and not a product. ebrains.eu

What's missing for a big HBP product?

A precise goal: @AllenInstitute or @IntlBrainLab who focused on gathering clean and open sourced neuro data have a much clearer than HBP. I use their data.

Mixing neuro datasets with neuromorphic computing on a single platform is absurd!

The HBP success is the pile of publications, this is what most HBP researchers were fighting for anyways. Trying to build a product-chimera from this cosmos of research result is a political move.

But for successful product it would have been needed to start with the vision.

Sadly, this brings me back to Markam, although most HBP members who signed up for the money did not want to simulate the Human Brain it is partly how people will remember our work inside the HBP.