My Paul Allen Brain Project Hypothesis
I wish I had some exciting neuroscience news to report but none at the moment catches my fancy. Lots of deadlines coming up, including the Society for Neuroscience abstract submission (May 15, which will probably get pushed back a few days). I couldn’t help noticing that the Paul Allen Brain Institute has turned into a circus for Nature Neuroscience, which I regard as kind of funny because it suggests that the Paul Allen crew lacks content of their own to post on their site so they need to grab it from other sources. How lame is that? If I want Nature Neuroscience content, I’ll visit the Nature Neuroscience website, and besides, we already have sites like neurotransmitter.net and HubMed that will show you publications from various journals. Three years ago the Paul Allen Brain Project kicked off with such noble ambitions, and now they’re reduced to displaying Nature Neuroscience ads! What’s up with that? Why don’t they display their own content and data analysis that they generate with their own in situ data? The Allen Brain people have been working with their mouse gene expression data for three years, and have produced no published analyses of their data, nor have they provided any tools to let other people analyze and datamine their data. What is wrong with these people? What the hell have they been doing for three long years? How can they have so little to show for it? And they had $100 million dollars to boot!
Am I being too critical of the Allen Brain people? No. Their buffoonery fiasco is going to make it that much harder to undertake any large-scale neuroscience in the years to come. They had the opportunity, and more importantly, the responsibility, to get this job done right, and they completely bungled it up. They do not have my sympathy, only my severe disappointment and disgust.
At this time, I would like to formally state my Paul Allen Brain Project Hypothesis, which is that someone in their organization must be intentionally trying to sabotage the Paul Allen Brain Project because no organization can be this inept unintentionally.
In my opinion, it’s just another nail in the coffin of the Allen Brain Project,… and life goes on.
Time to meet those deadlines.