Three expatriate Brazilian neuroscientists have launched a bid to build a research centre in the northern coastal city of Natal in Brazil. According to their plans, the institute will focus on neuroscience, and will include a mental-health clinic and a school for underprivileged children.

The move is well timed — Brazil's new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has pledged to boost the country's research budget and promote science in areas away from the traditional centres of excellence in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the south (see News Feature, page 379). But those involved in the bid admit that it will be difficult to raise the US$20 million needed to set up the centre.

The three neuroscientists behind the plan are Miguel Nicolelis and Sidarta Ribeiro of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Claudio Mello of the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. They say that the new institute will employ expertise in molecular and cellular biology and electrophysiology in an attempt to understand the basic mechanisms that control cellular circuits within the brain.

The plans have already gained some eminent backers. Nicolelis says that Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel, president emeritus of Rockefeller University in New York, has agreed to be a trustee. And Jon Kaas, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who has collaborated with Brazilian researchers for two decades, will also join the board. “There is a lot of very good talent in Brazil, but they have had a hard time getting research time and research facilities,” says Kaas.

Additional facilities such as the mental-health centre and the children's school will dot the institute's campus. “There will be a large social programme linked to the scientific endeavour,” says Nicolelis. The school, for example, will enrol over 300 underprivileged toddlers and provide them with an education rich in science, language and arts until their late teens.

But funding the institute is likely to be a struggle. The neuroscientists plan to collect money through a non-profit organization which will be named after the Brazilian aviation pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont. Nicolelis estimates that they will need over $20 million to build the institute and set up an endowment. But he has received only $50,000 in pledges from private donors, and he concedes that most of this will be used to finance an international symposium on neuroscience scheduled to take place in Natal in March 2004.

Brazilian politicians, including science minister Roberto Amaral and education minister Cristovam Buarque, have backed the project. But officials at the Brazilian government say that their contribution will primarily be a donation of a 150 acres of land. The majority of funding for Brazilian science currently comes from state and federal government, raising questions about how much money Nicolelis and his colleagues will be able to raise from private sources in the country.