NeuroScience and Service.
The brain has often been described, quite accurately, as one of the most complex objects in the natural world. Understanding its workings, to say nothing about intervening in them, is among the hardest problems in science. While this makes the challenge all the more enticing, in the short term, it acts to limit the impact that neuroscience can have on real-world problems. A comprehensive understanding of fundamental principles of brain function, and their translation into treatments for brain disorders, may be decades away. Even as we pursue these long-term goals, what are the prospects for our field to engage with some of the pressing challenges the world currently faces? An initiative that I have had the opportunity of being involved with, Project Prakash, illustrates one way forward. The operational model that it has adopted enables an immediate merging of basic research and societal service.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Electronic address: psinha@mit.edu.
Pawan
P
Sinha
D001766:Blindness / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D009488:Neurosciences / Q000458:organization & administration* / Q000639:trends; D012941:Social Responsibility
blindness; global impact; service