Neuroethics – a growing field that studies the ethical, legal, and societal implications of neuroscience – is an essential partner to neuroscience. It can serve to anticipate and address ethical questions raised in and by research, and flourishes with active collaboration and integration with neuroscience.

The current COVID-19 pandemic provides a contemporary case study for discussing this neuroethics-neuroscience partnership. It raises important ethical questions for the healthcare system and its providers, and these questions are especially relevant for patients with brain diseases/disorders. It also has extensive implications for existing neuroscience research, such as delaying certain research studies, affecting the ability to recruit and work with trial participants, and, in some cases, suggesting a need to shift research focus to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the nervous system.

In this session, Drs. Christine Grady and Scott Kim, members of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH Clinical Center, will first give a short presentation on ethics in the time of COVID-19, as described in a recent Neurology commentary. Representatives from small-group discussions will provide summary reports regarding attendee thoughts on ethical considerations in the time of COVID-19.

How to Use Social Media to Promote BRAIN Science

Recent advances in high-throughput single-cell transcriptomics and epigenomics methods allow to measure the expression of thousands of genes and identify the gene transcriptional regulation sites in large number of single cells. The scale and high information content of the advanced single-cell omics methods now, for the first time, promise to define all or most cell types and states at molecular level in human and other mammalian brains. The molecular taxonomies are the first step of the BICCN toward establishing comprehensive brain cell reference atlases, to facilitate developing cell-specific targeting tools to modulate brain circuits in controlled manner and understanding molecular and cellular mechanisms of brain disorders. Seven BICCN investigators will present comprehensive cell census results obtained from mouse, human, and monkey brains in complementary manner.

Recent developments in reporters for calcium, voltage, and neurotransmitters, together with interest in understanding neuronal circuit function, have driven the development of methods for fast volumetric imaging of the brain. Speakers in this symposium will present new optical methods for recording neuronal activity indicators through larger volumes or with higher framerates than previously possible.

With technology advances and collaboration between engineers and neuroscientists, single-synapse network maps of the brain are possible at increasing scales. In this symposium, our speakers will present recent research breakthroughs as well as their perspectives on the field. This symposium includes a panel to discuss current capabilities, open challenges, and new opportunities and research targets.

The BRAIN Initiative is enabling exciting advances in our understanding of human neuroscience. This session will highlight recent advances made towards understanding the human nervous system. Speakers will present the advancement made and ethical considerations they encounter in their work.

Novel neurotechnologies are generating exciting opportunities for groups in The BRAIN Initiative and the broader biomedical community to re-imagine the boundaries of recording and modulating the human central nervous system. In this symposium, speakers will present novel neurotechnologies being used in human studies. Capabilities, limitations and ethical considerations will be covered across several modalities.

The goal is to inform the community of the BRAIN Initiative's support for the diversity of species used in neuroscience research. By leveraging advances in genetics and neuroscience tools, new species are being explored and developed for their utility in addressing outstanding neurobiological questions. This symposium will showcase circuits-related research that feature non-traditional species. Then, discussion will follow on the challenges and opportunities in expanding the diversity in species used for neuroscience studies.

This symposium will feature presenters whose research, jointly considered, may propel machine learning (ML) beyond statistical pattern matching to dynamical multi-scale interpretations. Key gaps in ML include the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, unsupervised learning, and task transfer/generalization, which are solved by the brain but challenge our computational understanding. How can we translate decades of animal studies into useful spatial, sensory, and motivational signals to explain foraging strategies? The panel will also be encouraged to discuss how recent advances in experimental and data sciences might advance theoretical neuroscience. Our panel will clarify and prioritize research gaps for the future of theory- and data-driven dynamical neuroscience and ML.

The BRAIN Initiative has enabled the development of novel neural recording tools that can benefit many labs, but are difficult to transition to industry for a variety of reasons. Here we assemble a panel of experts who have developed and distributed novel electrode arrays to different labs. Each will discuss the unique capabilities of their approaches in addition to the critical lessons learned from early distribution and potential models to make these technologies widely available