Neuroinformatics as a megascience issue

The greatest increment in acquired knowledge about the brain has occurred in the last two decades, aided by technological advances in molecular biology, molecular genetics, brain imaging, and other new technologies brought about through the computer revolution. The amount of information being generated is increasing in an exponential fashion due to these and ether approaches used by the estimated 50000 neuroscientists working around the globe. These individual investigators working in small groups on highly focused projects publish their results in one of the roughly 200 scientific journals which are published monthly. It is humanly impossible under the current system to integrate all of these data into a meaningful picture of how the brain develops and functions and malfunctions. The complexity and quantity of neuroscience data drives the need to create a global information management system for the neuroscience community. The possibility to do this has already been amply demonstrated by the genome community through bioinformatics. Compared to sequence data, data generated through neuroscience research have many more levels of complexity, including genomic data. This effective demonstration in bioinformatics and the continual advances in the fields of computer and information sciences clearly point to the need for the neuroscience community to embrace and engage the science of informatics, through the global development of the new field of neuroinformatics.