Tattooed scientists are taking over!

Christof Koch is one of the world's leading experts on consciousness. A longtime professor at Caltech, he's just become the chief scientific officer at the Allen Brain Institute, an innovative research center that was funded with $100 million from Microsoft's Paul Allen. The institute has spent the past eight years building remarkably detailed, three-dimensional atlases of mouse brains. Now, as Koch explains to Nature, he will use those atlases to launch an ambitious new project:

The idea is to focus on one or two behaviours — how we see, for instance, or smell, or remember — and ask how the relevant information is encoded, represented and transformed to give rise to behaviour.

The challenge is a bit like creating the Thirty Meter Telescope, which is going to be built on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in the next decade, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. There you have a couple of hundred people who are all working toward a common goal.

Neuroscience hasn't had something like that, but the time is right to bring all these resources to bear ...