A Brain for Europe: Big Science, Big Models, and the Politics of Unification

How the effort to build a unified model of the human brain helps us reconsider the tension between unification and pluralism in science and in Europe.

The Human Brain Project was launched by the European Commission in 2013 to build a digital research infrastructure that scientists across the world could use to unify neuroscientific knowledge. One of its goals was to build a detailed, large-scale model and simulation of the human brain. But less than a year after its launch, hundreds of scien...