Two Foundations Collaborate On Cognitive Neuroscience

WASHINGTON—Two major foundations have put up $12 million to get a new discipline off the ground. They’ve drafted neurobiologists and cognitive scientists as pilot and copilot in the hope that, once airborne, cognitive neuroscience will improve our understanding of the biological basis of complete behavior. In December, the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience will award $1.2 million grants to six institutions to help crystallize efforts in this hybrid approach to mastering the mind-brain connection. More than a dozen universities aie competing for the prize, to be spread over three years, and last week they made their pitch. The schools include the University of Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, the University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGill, the University of Oregon, Oxford, the University of Pittsburgh, Yale, and a consortium including the Scripps Clinic; the Salk Institute for Biological Studies; and the University of California, San Diego. The program will also offer $1.6 million a year in small grants. The foundations are starting out with a three-year commitment to the idea. But it may take much longer to tell whether these interdisciplinary efforts can lead to the new discipline these foundations envision. Cognitive neuroscience seeks to explain human mental events by drawing on the principles of clinical and basic neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. “It’s sort of a derivative field that’s just coming into its own,” says Debbie Cleman, director of the neuropsychology program at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging. By linking these disciplines, cognitive neuroscientists want to consider the limitations of brain structure when developing psychological theories and place theories of cognition on firmer biological footing.. A few people have been searching for biological bases of behavior for decades. Among them are cognitive scientists, who a decade ago were the Young Turks among experimental psychologists. However, as these elaborate biological theories about human think, remember, and learn evolved, less and less attention was paid to the brain itself. To those who devote their lives to probing the brain and monitoring its chemicals, such theoretical efforts seemed haphazard. On the other hand, these neuroscientists have been incapable of offering much in the way of an overall theory. Although their research led to significant progress in understanding molecular and cellular events in the nervous system, their reductionist line of inquiry could not address how the brain works as a whole. “The challenge is to bring these groups together and define what needs to be done,” says Thomas W. Langfitt, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts. “They talk different languages now; they are suspicious of one another.” Four years ago John Bruer, president of the McDonnell Foundation, waded into the fray. He convened five panels of experts, who spent 18 months reviewing the research in this poorly defined discipline and drafting a strategy. Officials at Pew Charitable Trusts had a similar interest in both fields, and the two organizations recognized the value of pooling their resources. The result is the Cognitive Neuroscience Program, to be directed by psychologist George Miller at Princeton University. Each foundation has committed $2 million per year, and if all goes well that support will extend through the end of the 1990s. “It is an excellent opportunity for foundations to get in on the ground floor and create a discipline,” says Langfitt. “I think now is exactly the right time.” Right Timing Three factors help make this the right time, believes Stephen Kosslyn, professor of psychology at Harvard. Studies of the effects on behavior of stroke and other brain injuries, under way for the past decade, cry out for biological explanations. At the same time, greater access to high-powered computers has allowed scientists to build neural network models to test and refine theories about how the brain works. In addition, new imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography make it possible to explore the living, intact brain. Cognition is still a difficult subject to tackle experimentally, says Michael Gazzaniga, Andrew Thomson Professor of Psychology at Dartmouth Medical School. But the new techniques, he says, will allow “the advances to be of a deeper quality, of a more sophisticated kind.” In some ways McDonnell and Pew are picking up where the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation left off. Twenty years ago Sloan helped launch the field of neuroscience by investing $15 million for five-year programs in what then seemed like a very interdisciplinary approach to studying the nervous system. It later gave an important boost to cognitive science as well. These grants helped trigger the reorganization of departments and researchers throughout the United States as scientists came to recognize neuroscience and cognitive science as independent fields. Thus, the current effort by McDonnell and Pew to wed these fields and create the cognitive neuroscience discipline is a new turn in an ongoing process. With $400,000 per year, Miller says, "you can’t build something that doesn’t exist. But you can fill in the holes. We want closet cognitivists to come out into the open." Judging by the initial response to the program, such scientists could fill quite a lot of rooms. The Cognitive Neuroscience Program invited 48 institutions, identified by the panels and from lists of NIH grantees, to submit proposals. The guidelines were deliberately vague to en- courage innovative approaches. Miller expected about 20 responses; instead, 45 institutions decided to participate. Like many campuses, these universities already have excellent psychology, computer science, and neurobiology departments. “The question is, ‘How do you get senior scientists to work in a, collaborative way?’” says Bruer. Some of the finalists, like Brown and Harvard, said they would use the grant to recruit and support more graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. There are other telltale signs that neuroscientists, computer scientists, and cognitive scientists are willing to cross department lines in the name of this new discipline. The Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience, begun in 1988 at Harvard and held last summer at Dartmouth, was oversubscribed and an “outrageous success,” say its organizers. Next year Dartmouth will begin offering a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience, one of the first degrees of its kind. The 1-year-old journal Cognitive Neuroscience already has 1,000 subscrib- ers. And the Office of Naval Research has put cognitive neuroscience on its 1991 agenda and plans to spend $700,000 a year to find out, how people learn what .they do during their military training. But not everyone is sure that cognitive neuroscience is ready to take off: “It still needs a bit more testing,” says Katherine Bick, NIH deputy director for extramural research. Right now, NIH supports many of the scientists working in the field, but without labeling it as cognitive neuroscience. The field is too new, too unfamiliar, and too nsKy ror most. grant reviewers and federal grants programs, she says. “We have to educate people,” says Clainan, who wants to sponsor a workshop next year to examine what this field can contribute to understanding the aging process. As vice president and chief scientific officer for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, W. Maxwell Cowan is paid to follow the latest trends in biomedical research. And his view of cognitive neuroscience is cautiously optimistic. “It’s already on the runway and moving at an accelerating pace,” he says. “But it doesn’t have anything like the rigor that cellular and molecular biology have. It’s going to take longer to gather the momentum it needs.”

Two Foundations Collaborate On Cognitive Neuroscience

Interested in reading more?

Become a Member of