THE RISE OF NEUROSCIENCE

The US government designated the 1990s as ‘The Decade of the Brain’. The huge expansion of the neurosciences which took place during that decade has led many to suggest that the first ten years of this new century should be claimed as ‘The Decade of the Mind’. Capitalising on the scale and technological success of the Human Genome Project, understanding – even decoding – the complex interconnected web between the languages of brain and those of mind has come to be seen as science's final frontier. With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe – always of course excepting the interaction of some 6 billion of such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem.

The global scale of the research effort now put into the neurosciences, primarily in the United States, but closely followed by Europe and Japan, has turned them from classical ‘little sciences’ into a major industry engaging large teams of researchers, involving billions of dollars from government – including its military wing – and the pharmaceutical industry. Such growth cannot be understood in isolation from the social and economic forces driving our science forward.

The consequence is that what were once disparate fields – anatomy, physiology, molecular biology, genetics and behaviour – are now all embraced within ‘neurobiology’.