Visions of unification and integration: Building brains and communities in the European Human Brain Project

Tara Mahfoud

doi:10.1177/1461444820929576

Abstract

The Human Brain Project (HBP) was launched in October 2013 by the European Commission to build an information and communication technology infrastructure that would support large-scale brain modelling and simulation. Less than a year after its launch, more than 800 neuroscientists signed a letter that claimed the HBP ‘would fail to meet its goals’. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between February 2014 and January 2017 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the HBP headquarters in Switzerland, and over 40 interviews with scientists, engineers and project administrators, this article traces how competing visions over how brain models should be built became tied into debates over how scientific communities should be governed. Articulations of these different kinds of models and communities appealed to competing imaginaries of Europe itself – of Europe and European science as unified or pluralistic. This article argues that scientific models are sites of contestation over social and political futures. The tensions between visions of scientific unification and pluralism in the HBP mirrored the tensions between imaginaries of European political unification and pluralism.

Highlights

The darkness breaks with a flash of blue light
For those working across the boundaries between the neurosciences and informatics, the building of maps and models of human and animal brains is tied into visions of data unification, integration and standardisation
What I have demonstrated in this article is the parallels between the unificatory visions of the Human Brain Project (HBP) and European Commission (EC) through the Flagship Initiatives

Summary

Introduction

The darkness breaks with a flash of blue light. Little bits of white light cross the boundaries of the screen, coming together in the centre to form the Human Brain Project (HBP). The tensions between visions of scientific unification and pluralism in the HBP mirrored the tensions between imaginaries of European political unification and pluralism For those working across the boundaries between the neurosciences and informatics, the building of maps and models of human and animal brains is tied into visions of data unification, integration and standardisation. Visions of unification are exactly that which stand in the way of ‘the collaborative effort in Europe that will further our understanding of the brain’ (neurofuture.eu, 2014) In these visions for the future of neuroscience in Europe, unification stands in contrast to pluralism; while the former assumes a singular whole, the latter calls for a multiple account of the ways data can come together. In the process of building these unifying tools, whose data and methods would get integrated, whose would get left out and how would these choices be made?

Methods

Findings

Conclusion