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Paul Allen’s support for the Allen Institute has always seemed more a personal and, perhaps, amateurish effort to do something impressive than the sort of hard-edged .. almost industrial commitment … his buddy Gates has made in malaria research or the fundamental science that has driven so much clinical benefit from work at the UW, the Hutch, and the Benaorya.  The Allen project, “mapping”  gene expression was expensive and the results are beautiful to the eye but probably not the sort of science that leads to mechanistic insights.

Now that has changed. Yesterday Mr. Allen announced $300 million in funding focused on the neuroscience of vision.  This could be very exciting.  One of the greatest problem solvers on the 20th century, Francis Crick, wrote a great book suggesting that solving the problem of hw the brain “sees” might well be the magic step to understanding the entire brain.   The grant brings Allen’s total funding for the institute to half a billion dollars — and could well attract the kind of new investigators that would interact with the UW’s already outstanding computational biology program and neurosciences effort.

Allen is quoted “If you start out as a programmer — I did in high school — the brain works in a completely unknown and different fashion than computers do, and it’s amazingly complex,” Allen said Wednesday. “So there is really no greater challenge with potentially huge impact than understanding how brains work.”