Interview Of The Week

Interview Of The Week: Henry Markram, Frontiers

Henry Markram, a distinguished professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL) co-founded the scientific publisher Frontiers, with his wife, neuroscientist Kamila Markram, to accelerate collaboration and increase the quality of science across all academia through open science. They also created the Frontiers Foundation to bring actionable science to policy, industry and the public through the Frontiers Planet Prize.

Markram, a speaker at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, is a leading figure in brain simulation. He is the founder of the Blue Brain Project, which created detailed digital replicas of the brain, and founder of the Human Brain Project, a major EU initiative to advance understanding of the human brain. With over 450 publications and approximately 55,000 citations, his work significantly influences the fields of brain architecture and how the brain learns. Markram also established the Open Brain Institute, a not-for-profit foundation, to democratize access to brain simulation through virtual laboratories, making the tools and data available to allow researchers worldwide to simulate the brain. He is now focused on developing artificial general intelligence in inait, a company he formed to focus on teaching digital brains to acquire skills, continuing his mission to unlock the full potential of the brain.

Markram spoke to The Innovator during the Forum’s annual meeting about the power of open science and how business can leverage it.

Q: Please tell us a little about Frontiers, why you launched it and how you think it advances science.

HM:  Let’s start by putting this into the perspective of the climate crisis, which is a very complex crisis. It requires a broad range of science to cover the nine planetary boundaries as defined by Johan Rockström [a Swedish scientist, internationally recognized for his work on global sustainability issues.] There is a huge spectrum of issues, ranging from the health of the ocean and biodiversity to food security and air pollution. Today’s science can address several of these issues, but we will need new science to reach the climate goals.

Which brings me to Frontiers. Kamila and I realized 17 years ago that we can easily increase the speed of high-quality science output by simply transitioning from closed, subscription-based publishing to open access. So,we launched Frontiers as a fully digital high tech open access publishing platform to free science for everyone to read, participate in and drive collaborations. We believe that the way to get better science is to make it more transparent and accelerate cooperation worldwide to allow more players to have deeper engagement.

When it comes to the climate crisis we are out of time, and we urgently need the acceleration that open science can bring. There is a huge stream of around 4 million science papers, and we need to fish out those that can make a difference today. But it normally takes decades for any new science to reach a consensus. Without consensus policy makers can’t easily act and business and investors place bets, lose time and waste resources.

Q: How do we accelerate the process?

HM: The Frontiers Foundation established the Frontiers Planet Prize to fast-track actionable scientific solutions to humanity’s most pressing planetary challenges. By incentivizing the breakthrough science that can solve planetary challenges, and by accelerating global scientific consensus, the prize addresses critical gaps in the fight against climate change.

The global Covid pandemic illustrated the power of open science.  The world turned to scientists, and their work was accelerated when all the relevant scientific literature was made openly available in the CORD-19 database, leading to the development of vaccines and treatments in record time. If we did it for Covid, why can’t we do it for climate?

Q: What makes this Planetary Prize different from others?

HM: Global scientific consensus. The planetary prize operates as a rigorous process to identify, validate and amplify breakthroughs. There are over 4000 contributing scientists and 610 participating research institutions in 60 countries. Universities around the world nominate their most impactful peer-reviewed studies from the previous two years. National academies select three national nominees based on scientific excellence and societal impact, then a jury of 100 top scientists in sustainability research and earth-system science select the national champions for each participating country and the three international champions, the latter of which are each awarded $1 million to scale up their work. We also help the winners get on the stage, like at the one in Davos, in front of policy makers, business leaders and venture capitalists that can help translate their science into action.

History has shown if you reach actionable science, you can achieve immediate global collaboration. All the politics disappears.  Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are a good example. After scientists identified that they were damaging the ozone the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer  was adopted in 1987, marking a turning point in environmental history. Action happened because after scientific consensus, demonstrating that when the process of science is complete, political willpower falls into place and the results can change the world.

The Planetary Prize operates under the same principle. It is designed to reveal the actionable science that policy makers can adopt today and serve as a catalyst for collaborative action. Countries can adopt supporting policies because they can trust that this is the science the research community stands behind, and business can invest because they know the science is actionable and supported by policy.

Q: What will you be talking about in Davos?

HM: My research, which is focused on how to recreate the brain in computers. The Swiss government initiated the project 20 years ago and gave me $300 million and the mission to work out how to build the brain in a computer. We had 1,100 scientists and engineers collaborating on the project, and this year we completed the mission of working out all the main steps and challenges involved in making “digital brain tissue,” the virtual equivalent of a biological brain.

We focused on the more interesting experiments that that cannot be carried out in a biology lab and that help us understand the brain’s architecture.  This guides research on treatment, such as how do you design electrodes for people with a disease such as Parkinson’s and where do you place them? This is one initiative.

We have also established virtual labs to make this technology open to all. The Open Brain Institute is a non-profit entity that allows anybody to build digital brain tissue and to explore research questions not possible before, benefitting from our 20 years of work..

At inait, my startup, we are taking digital brains on the journey towards AGI [artificial general intelligence]. Humanity is halfway in the journey since we know how to capture humanity’s knowledge, in any language and any style, and package it in workflows and automate it. That is a revolution, but let me give you an illustration to show why I say we are only at the halfway mark. Today, AI does not have the cognitive skills of a bird flying in a gust of wind and catching a bug mid-air, which involves active perception, real-time decision making, strategy planning, retrieving memory and a deep understanding of the physics of the world. This is a major challenge.  No AI can do that today. Only the architecture of the actual brain can perform this feat of interacting with the physical world and learn about the physics, motion, immersion and prediction of what is going to happen. That is the next revolution.

I think we can do it with digital brains but as neuroscientists we need more players, more collaboration. Scientific publishing needs to be open to share and accelerate our understanding of the brain and to push the boundaries. The brain is the last frontier – it contains trillions of synapses – so if we really want to understand the brain, we need to drive open access to knowledge and transdisciplinary research in chemistry, material science, in genetics and more.

Open science is the key to understanding the brain, getting us out of the climate crisis, and providing solutions to myriad other challenges our society is facing. That is why Frontiers is focused on open access publishing and transforming science into actionable science. This is also one reason we are here in Davos this week. With the expertise of our 230,000 editors of scientific publications around the world, we provide support to the World Economic Forum by co-publishing the annual “Top Ten Emerging Technology” report, with other reports in the planning phase.

What do you want The Innovator’s readers to take away from this interview?

HM: If we can close the loop and convince business to support the Frontiers Planet Prize it will lead to more actionable science. It will create a virtuous cycle that could produce a huge array of technological solutions to address the climate emergency. It is also clear that not every country or business will be able to adapt using the same approach. We need to take their specific context into consideration — there is no one silver bullet. We are working to create a diversity of solutions to give them options. They need reliable science and clear policy support in order to invest with confidence. Business is the key player in taking scientific insight and scaling this into products that benefit society, but it can be difficult to know which approach to invest in. When there is academic consensus and government policy support the route forward is clearer.  Our advice to business is to invest in consensus science, such as the actionable solutions that have been deeply vetted through the selection process of the Frontiers Planet Prize.

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About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.