THERE’S no question about it, neuroscience research is booming. As the population ages, brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are going to be the major health burdens of the future. Neuroscience is having more and more to say about the origins of and potential treatments for psychiatric illnesses, pain, stroke, dementia, epilepsy, addiction and obesity. The decade of the brain – an initiative to promote neuroscience research during the 1990s – may have drawn to a close, but it is as if this was just an opening act.
With the human genome project just completed, the complex genetic and environmental interplay…
