On June 25, 2008, the IOM Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders held a workshop focused on identifying grand challenges in neuroscience, titled From Molecules to Mind: Challenges for the 21st Century. Click here to view the workshop’s agenda (note: this agenda contains links to speaker presentations and the corresponding audiofiles).

Purpose of the Workshop:

The unifying theme for this workshop is the need to expand the understanding of how perception, cognition, and action arise in the human brain from interactions between molecules, chemicals, neurons, and circuits, the brain’s fundamental building blocks. This concept is pertinent to every level of brain organization, from understanding how molecules become assembled into neurons to how neurons get assembled into neuronal circuits, how those circuits develop unique properties and capabilities, and finally how dysfunction at any of these levels may lead to disorders of the brain.

Objectives:

• Illuminate the progress and successes made by the neuroscience community and highlight the challenges still facing the field.
• Identify the guiding principles, fundamental scientific questions, and goals that will inspire the scientific and public communities to support and engage this grand challenge.
• Identify the infrastructure and resource requirements that will be necessary to advance and accelerate discovery, including:
  • What will be the technology needs?
  • Which disciplines will need to be engaged and what will be their training requirements?
  • What partnerships need to be forged?  

Workshop Summary and Presentations:

A publicly available summary of the workshop is currently being prepared in accordance with institutional policy and procedures and published by the National Academies Press. The summary will not be a consensus document, and thus will not not contain findings or recommendations by the planning committee. Opinions and statements that will be included in the summary are solely those of the individual persons or participants at the workshop, and will not necessarily be adopted or endorsed or verified as accurate by the National Academies.  The workshop summary will be available here online in early fall of 2008.  Please check back.

Copies of speaker presentations and audio files are available for download from the workshop agenda page.  

NOTE:  These are unedited audiofiles of the From Molecules to Mind: Challenges for the 21st Century, held on June 25th, 2008, and is not an official report of National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, or the National Research Council (collectively the “National Academies”)   Opinions and statements included in the audiofiles and presentations are solely those of the individual persons or participants at the workshop, and are not necessarily adopted or endorsed or verified as accurate by the National Academies. 

Workshop Planning Committee:

An ad hoc planning committee was appointed by the IOM to organize the workshop. It included representatives from the Neuroscience Forum and others to assist in the organization and planning of this event.

Contact Us:

Do you have questions concerning this project? Please send an email to neuroforum@nas.edu.