The Human Brain Project will also study the mouse brain to build its prizewinning simulation. Credit: FZJ

Two of the biggest awards ever made for research have gone to boosting studies of the wonder material graphene and an elaborate simulation of the brain. The winners of the European Commission’s two-year Future and Emerging Technologies ‘flagship’ competition, announced on 28 January, will receive €500 million (US$670 million) each for their planned work, which the commission hopes will help to improve the lives, health and prosperity of millions of Europeans.

The Human Brain Project, a supercomputer simulation of the human brain conceived and led by neuroscientist Henry Markram at the Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology in Lausanne, scooped one of the prizes. The other winning team, led by Jari Kinaret at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, hopes to develop the potential of graphene — an ultrathin, flexible, electrically conducting form of carbon — in applications such as personal-communication technologies, energy storage and sensors.

The size of the awards — matching funds raised by the participants are expected to bring each project’s budget up to €1 billion over ten years — have some researchers worrying that the flagship programme may draw resources from other research. And both winners have already faced criticism.

Many neuroscientists have argued, for example, that the Human Brain Project’s approach to modelling the brain is too cumbersome to succeed (see Nature 482, 456–458; 2012). Markram is unfazed. He explains that the project will have three main thrusts. One will be to study the structure of the mouse brain, from the molecular to the cellular scale and up. Another will generate similar human data. A third will try to identify the brain wiring associated with particular behaviours. The long-term goals, Markram says, include improved diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases, and brain-inspired technology.

“It’s a very bold project,” says Mark Fishman, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adding that it will “no doubt spawn unexpected new research directions, probably to help develop supercomputing and medical robotics”. No one knows exactly what data will be needed to simulate the human brain, he says — “the Human Brain Project will help us find out”.

The graphene project faces the criticism that the potential of the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon, first reported by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester, UK, in 2004, may be overhyped. The material’s extraordinary line-up of properties — transparency, electrical conductivity, flexibility and strength — has wowed industry and academia alike, leading to visions of cheap solar cells and large-screen mobile phones that can be rolled up to pocket size. It also won Geim and Novoselov the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.

But analysts caution that graphene’s properties are no guarantee of commercial success. “Major challenges, such as high costs, processing issues and competing materials, loom large,” cautions Ross Kozarsky, who leads the advanced-materials team at business analysts Lux Research in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kinaret thinks that the steady, long-term funding for graphene research under the flagship project should help to address those problems, and could allow Europe to pull ahead of Asia in commercializing the material.

But whether either project will receive all of the promised funding is unclear. The European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme of research, which ends in December, has provided €108 million to support the ‘ramp-up’ phase of the two winning projects for their first 30 months. Its 2014–20 successor, Horizon 2020, will support the second phase. But the Horizon 2020 budget is likely to fall well short of the €77.6 billion proposed by the commission, and some observers fear that support earmarked for the flagships may be scaled back as a result.

Thousands of scientists across Europe worked intensively on developing the diverse project bids that were submitted to the competition — from computerized personal medicine to perceptive robots that respond to human needs. Some participants complain that the competition’s goalposts seemed to shift during the selection process. At first, they claim, the commission stressed that winning projects would be chosen mainly for their scientific excellence. “But it became clear that impact for economic growth and for consumers was becoming more important — understandable in the economic climate,” says Kinaret.

However, Wolfgang Boch, head of the commission’s flagship unit, says that a panel of 25 experts from science and industry eventually chose the two winners on the basis of the published criteria, and that scientific excellence counted for 50% of the final ranking.

Even losers say they benefited from the competition. When the interim rankings were published last July, FuturICT was tipped to win. That project aims to model human activities and their impact on global political stability, the environment and financial markets. Its coordinator, Dirk Helbing, a physicist-turned-sociologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, says he is disappointed, but that the interdisciplinary community the project created “will stay alive and active”.

“We know that covert FuturICT-like projects are being started in other parts of the world,” he says. “That makes it even more important to continue our open, transparent and participatory project.”