I just came back today from a two-day conference at NIH over the federally-funded Human Brain Project. Ten years after it's official launch, this conference was supposed to represent a progress report over the previous 10 yrs and a prospective look at things to come, and I am happy to announce that the future looks very bright. Not only is data sharing on the rise, but public accessibility to all sorts of neuroscience data (largely online) is also rapidly increasing with the recognition and acceptance that it's in everyones best interest to share data with everyone else (so long as proper acknowledgements are given in publications).

Also, in 3 yrs time, the Paul Allen Brain Project (which has similar aims as the Human Brain Project, though it is not the same as the Human Brain Project; it's financed by Microsoft Cofounder Paul Allen and is not federally-funded) intends to have the distributions of 20,000 mRNA (the estimated number of transcribed genes, which is about 2/3 the total number in the mouse genome of 30,000) throughout the mouse brain determined using in situ hybridization, a feat which is comparable in scale to the Human Genome Project.

As was said at the conclusion today, the previous ten years of the Human Brain Project involved a lot of work (and a lot of results too), but the next 10 yrs will yield the biggest fruits. And this is something to look forward to, or better yet, to get intimately involved in.