TechnologyReview | On a beautiful April morning, chemist Paul Weiss is darting across
the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, in red-framed
Wayfarer sunglasses and a suit. He’s on his way to make himself an
espresso, but even with a caffeine deficit he’s tough to keep up with.
Weiss put the coffee machine in his students’ office instead of his own,
to create more opportunities to check in with them and run into
colleagues.
Weiss, who heads the California Nanosystems Institute, a
state-sponsored research hub for all things nano, is a specialist in
developing new ways of probing single molecules like neurotransmitters
and those that make up the active layer in solar panels. However, with
caffeine in his system, what he wants to talk about is not chemistry but
community. For Weiss, 53, chemistry is a social science. "It’s about
making a connection," he says. To be able to do something useful, he
says, you have to connect to other people within and outside your field,
know what problems other fields like neuroscience or energy will be
facing in 10 years, and start building the necessary tools today.
As far as he’s concerned, one of the most important goals for the
next decade is to understand the human brain. To meet that challenge,
biologists need help from chemists, physicists, engineers, and other
toolmakers like him, he says. The brain has nearly 100 billion neurons
networked together by an estimated 100 trillion electrical and chemical
connections. How all these interactions combine to enable us to walk,
talk, learn, form memories, create—and how things go wrong in diseases
like Parkinson’s—is pretty much a mystery. Weiss hopes to create new
tools for probing the nanoscale chemical and electrical activity of
thousands to millions of neurons at once. "If we want to understand what
a memory is, how we learn—this is where we think the sweet spot is," he
says.
For years, Weiss has been recruiting researchers from apparently
distant fields to work on the problem—helping organize meetings of
scientists to talk about it, trying to bridge the gap between
neuroscientists and physical scientists. This organizing work has now
borne fruit. In April, President Obama requested $100 million in federal
funding for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. Private research institutions are
also chipping in. The Kavli Foundation, a nonprofit in Oxnard,
California, has pledged $40 million over the next 10 years. "His
profound understanding of the whole field of nanotechnology made a huge
difference," says the Kavli Foundation’s vice president of science
programs, Miyoung Chun, who helped coördinate the project that became
the BRAIN Initiative.
Researchers working in relative isolation have already made progress
on developing tools for studying the brain, including arrays of
nanoscale electrodes for probing neurons and computer programs for
analyzing the onslaught of data these kinds of measurements are expected
to generate. By working together, Weiss believes, researchers from
different fields can now accelerate advances by developing common,
widely available tools.
