Yep. Biologist here lol.

It would be interesting to know how much biology this dude truly explored before plunking down his $100M on some other dude promising him to revolutionize the brain.

BME / sensory neurosystems guy here.

>It would be interesting to know how much biology this dude truly explored before plunking down his $100M ...

Not enough.

Would you guys prefer that Johnson donate his $100M to the NIH or a university that's already working on related research, or is there benefit to him taking a different route and funding Berger and this org directly?

I think i'm largely agnostic about that in principle.

In practice, collaborations are hard and setting up new ones is even harder, so striking out into the wild and being able to do cool stuff fast generally costs more than 100M.

From what I understand though, that's exactly why Johnson invested his own money and turned down outside investment: this is just the first step on a very long road, and it doesn't sound like he anticipates a viable return in an amount of time that a venture fund could justify participating in.

>" The futuristic device, which Johnson says might actually not need to be implanted beneath the skull at all, is designed to facilitate communication between brain cells by hacking the “neural code” that enables our brain to store and recall key information. "

Estimated timescale: centuries. Not for want of trying, but we have no credible idea what "the" neural code is, even in subcortical areas that are relatively simple to study like the optic and auditory nerves. Once you're anywhere beyond the inferior colliculus, all bets are officially off. (and if you have any good ideas, drop me a line!)

Our best tools fail to explain anything particularly interesting about much, much simpler analogous systems: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/26/055624.

hopefully they've learned something from Blue Brain:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-bra...

Oddly enough, the applicable quote is from The Martian:

"We built a lunar lander from scratch in seven years."

Hard things get done by people who try to do them. Seriously, it's his own money.

Assuming this refers to the Apollo Lunar Module, landing on the moon was an engineering challenge based on known science, and it still cost an obscene amount of money for questionable benefit.

This is a relatively small sum being spent on a project for which very little of the basic science is in place. It may be his own money he's spending, but everyone else is also free to give their honest opinion that he's throwing it down the drain.

You realize that project cost billions of dollars with insanely huge teams of smart people working with established principles of physics, chemistry, and so on rather than mostly unknowns in neuroscience?

No practical comparison between this and Apollo despite me wanting an Apollo-style effort put into certain problems we face. Including understanding the brain although maybe communications infrastructure, cheap computing, and MOOC's first. That will give us more brains for Apollo-style endeavors.

> [Apollo] cost billions of dollars

I looked it up - around $20.4B in 1960s dollars, so $160B today. $20B per mooon landing. Not counting Mercury or Gemini.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1579/1

Wow. Much higher than I remembered. It's like the brute force approach to getting something done except the force is sheer dollars and labor focus on one goal.

Did you read the article? Where Johnson anticipates $7-10B in funding to get anything out the door? He's investing $100M of his own money to get things started. The point is that the reflexive negativity here is simply astonishing, again, given that we're all communicating via technology that, less than one century ago, would be considered pure magic.