Boston

Think about it: MRI scan of a healthy brain.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a bold plan to make itself a world leader in neuroscience. Last week, MIT announced the creation of an ambitious institute to study the human brain.

It will be the centrepiece of a new neuroscience complex, scheduled for completion in 2004. The McGovern Institute for Brain Research will be joined in the complex by an expanded version of MIT's Center for Learning and Memory (CLM) and a $20 million centre for brain imaging. “With all the resources here, MIT should stand among the best in this field,” says MIT molecular biologist Phillip Sharp, who will direct the institute.

Patrick McGovern, founder of computer publishing giant the International Data Group, and his wife Lore Harp McGovern, a high-tech entrepreneur, will give $350 million over 20 years — the largest gift ever pledged to a US university. They picked MIT, from which Patrick McGovern graduated in 1959, because of its reputation for fostering interdisciplinary research.

The McGovern Institute will house 16 labs and 300 staff. Its model is the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, also at MIT, where Lore Harp McGovern chairs the Board of Associates and her husband is a trustee. “I was impressed with how much progress they've made, for example, in understanding the causes of cancer and other diseases,” says Patrick McGovern. “It shows what can be done at a mission-oriented centre if you bring the right people together.”

For Sharp, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1993 for his work on RNA splicing, the move into neuroscience is a shift in direction. “This field is ready for rapid advance,” he says. Brain imaging techniques, tools from molecular biology and genetics, insights from the Human Genome Project, and increasing computer power offer huge potential, he says. “The challenge now is to put together a first-rate programme.” He expects the centre to be fully developed within about 10 years.

Sharp is working with Tomaso Poggio, an MIT computational neuroscientist, to chart future research directions. “We will have several years, if not longer, to make decisions about the range of programmes,” Sharp says.

The complex will also include the $20 million Martinos Imaging Center and the CLM. The imaging centre, to be shared with Harvard University and Harvard Medical School, will work on technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography, and optical imaging. “The idea is to use our technical prowess to advance these tools even further,” says Mriganka Sur, who chairs MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

The CLM, headed by MIT Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa, has seven investigators, with five more staff to be hired. It receives about half its funding, US$3.5 million per year, from the RIKEN Institute, a Japanese government agency — a figure expected to grow to US$5 million. Tonegawa predicts that the CLM and the McGovern Institute, working side by side, “will become a major force in neuroscience”.

The trick now is figuring out how to make the various pieces fit together. The tentative plan is for the CLM, which investigates learning, memory and neuroplasticity, to continue its emphasis on molecular- and cellular-level processes, while the McGovern will focus on higher-level functions, such as information processing in the brain.

“We want enough overlap so we can interact without duplicating each other's efforts,” says Sharp. “It's easy to identify broad themes of what we'd like to see emerge. But we won't know the specifics until we do the work.”