Defense funding allocated for MRI.

Byline: GREG BOLT The Register-Guard

The University of Oregon is still months away from taking its first in-depth pictures of the human brain, but a new congressional appropriation has moved it closer to its goal of unraveling mysteries as ephemeral as a passing thought.

As part of the defense spending bill just passed by Congress, the UO will get $1.8 million for its Brain, Biology and Machine Initiative. The interdisciplinary research effort soon will get a high-powered tool, a special research magnetic resonance imaging device that can map structures as small as a millimeter inside the brain.

The initiative already has received several large grants, including a $3 million "earmark" from the Defense Department almost two years ago and another $500,000 grant last year. An earmark is a direct appropriation by Congress to a specific institution for a specific project. That's different from the way most research money is appropriated through competitive, peer-reviewed grant proposals submitted to one of several large government research sponsors. The new appropriation also comes in the form of a Defense Department earmark.

Additional funds for the initiative come from two longtime UO supporters and alumni, Bob and Beverly Lewis, who donated $10 million to the initiative earlier this year.

With the latest appropriation, the UO will be able to further its research effort once the device - known as a functional magnetic resonance imager, or fMRI - is installed this spring. An addition to Straub Hall that will house the device and associated labs and equipment is nearing completion.

UO psychology professor Helen Neville said the additional appropriation will bolster the effort to better understand what happens inside the brain when people learn, experience emotion, communicate and think. And it will help in the effort to develop new treatments for brain injury, including strokes and Alzheimer's disease.

Neville said the UO device is twice as powerful as the diagnostic MRIs used in hospitals and will be only the second research-grade fMRI device installed outside a medical school in the United States. The other is at Princeton University.

"Oregonians should be proud of that," she said. "This $1.8 million will be a very, very welcome addition and will really raise the temperature on our ability to move this to the next level."

Although the funding comes from the Defense Department, UO officials said the research does not have direct military applications. The Defense Department is one of the largest sources of government research grants and has an interest in funding basic research that could have future applications for the armed services.

Richard Linton, vice provost for research at the university, said the funding will come through the Defense Department's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, or TATRC. The center is interested in remote sensing and diagnostic techniques for treating military personnel in the field.

"Its mission is largely to invigorate and move technology from basic research to the marketplace," Linton said. "In our case, it's largely funding basic research into the fundamental processes of the brain."

UO officials were a bit disappointed in the grant amount. The House version of the defense bill included $3 million for the research initiative and the Senate version called for $4 million.

Linton said he's not sure how the conference committee that reconciled the two bills arrived at the $1.8 million appropriation.

While the larger amount would have been nice, Linton said, the university is grateful for the funding.

"We're very happy with that, and that should be the message," he said.

Betsy Boyd, director of federal affairs for the university, credited the Oregon congressional delegation for securing the appropriation and said it's the largest direct grant received by an Oregon university this year.

"The Oregon delegation all pulled together for the university on this project," she said.

Neville said the UO already is one of the top schools in the nation in cognitive science, neuroscience and genomics, thanks to an outstanding faculty.

The new machine will further its ability to carry out cutting-edge research and add to the body of knowledge of the brain.

Currently, professors and graduate students have to travel to other schools across the country to carry out research using the fMRI, often being relegated to off hours when resident researchers are not using the machine.

The next goal in the initiative is to secure funding for an even more powerful fMRI that is used on animals. While the device being purchased by the UO can see structures as small as a millimeter, the animal fMRI can see down to the level of a micron, or one-thousandth of a millimeter.

That will aid research into how genes affect the brain by helping determine which genes are involved in brain development and processes and how they affect thinking and learning.