Paul G. Allen (1953–2018) Microsoft Co-Founder Who Established the Allen Institute for Brain Science
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COMMENT OBITUARY Paul G. Allen (1953–2018) Microsoft co-founder who established the Allen Institute for Brain Science. he world knew technology billionaire Institute for Artificial Intelligence in 2014.) Paul G. Allen as the other founder of I was recruited in 2011 to be the chief Microsoft — Bill Gates’s erstwhile scientist for the second decade of his brain Tpartner in revolutionizing personal com- institute. Fired up by having survived a sec- puting. Sports fans knew him as the owner ond bout of lymphoma in 2009, Paul tripled of Super-Bowl-winning football team the the institute’s size and budget. He tasked us Seattle Seahawks. To scientists, he was the to carry out a census of all cell types in the philanthropist behind the Allen Institute, mouse (see B. Tasic et al. Nature https://doi. known for its pioneering brain-mapping org/10.1038/s41586-018-0654-5; 2018) and research and cell science, and the Allen in the thousand-fold-bigger human brain, Institute for Artificial Intelligence. and to build the Allen Brain Observatory Allen, who died on 15 October, was born (see C. Koch and R. C. Reid Nature 483, 397– on 21 January 1953 in Seattle, Washington, a 398; 2012). This observatory is dedicated city to which he remained faithful throughout to large-scale surveys (similar to those in his life. With school friend Bill Gates, in 1975 astronomy) of cellular level activity in mice, he founded Micro-Soft, purveyors of operat- conducted using optical fluorescent micro- ing systems for the nascent desktop computer scopy and high-density electrical recordings. market. Bereft of its original hyphen, it grew In 2014, Paul started the Allen Institute for into one of the world’s most valuable compa- Cell Science, focused on visualizing the orga- nies, netting Allen a vast personal fortune. nelles inside engineered human cardiac cells. In 1983 he withdrew from day-to-day In 2015, the brain-mapping and cell-science involvement in the company to deal with efforts were amalgamated into a single Allen DOUG WILSON/CORBIS/GETTY early stage Hodgkin’s lymphoma (although Institute, with more than 500 staff in a sleek he remained on the board until 2000). This new building in Seattle, led by Allan Jones. close encounter with death and his wealth Sydney Brenner calls the CAP criteria — a Paul wasn’t a scientist and didn’t aspire freed him to pursue passions seeded in his community resource that is complete, accu- to be. He was a gifted and intensely curious youth — music, sports, the environment, rate and permanent. Its 3D coordinate system outsider who kept asking hard questions. His science fiction, space travel and science. has become the pole star by which thousands way of fuelling discovery was to empower Paul was attracted to the vast complex- of labs working on the mouse brain ori- entrepreneurial teams of scientists, engi- ity of biology. He was intrigued by how the ent themselves. The mouse atlas now gets neers and staff, challenging them to draw 3.2 billion nucleotide letters arrayed as strands hundreds of thousands of page visits a year, up tangible, time-stamped goals and mile- of DNA in a single fertilized egg give rise to twice as many as when it was created. stones. He was keen on knowing the answers, the 30 trillion cells that make up a human. In In quick succession, the institute produced and kept pushing for them: “If not yet, why March 2002, after the success of the Human gene-expression snapshots of the develop- not? What is holding us up?” He asked us to Genome Project, Paul convened meetings ing and mature brains of mice, non-human make hard choices if the stated goals could with geneticist James Watson and others to primates and humans. At Paul’s insistence, not be achieved, including shutting down focus on a big biology project of his own. and unusually for the time, all data, metadata underperforming research programmes. Paul wanted deliverables and milestones. and methodological white papers, were, and In person, Paul was discreet, almost He had been burned by an attempt in the continue to be, freely and publicly available diffident. At scientific advisory board meet- 1990s to seed innovation at his technology before associated discoveries are published. ings, he sat quietly in the back until asking incubator Interval Research in Palo Alto, This has had a transformative effect on the the one critical question that galvanized California, where he hired talents from field, and is now mandated by many funders. the room and changed the project’s trajec- Stanford University, the Massachusetts Flushed with success, Paul was embold- tory (without ever presuming to know the Institute of Technology and Bell Labs, and ened to ask harder questions concerning how answers; he was too humble for that). gave them carte blanche to work on Internet- the 100 billion neurons in the human brain At the time of his death from the same related ideas. On the initiative of neuro- give rise to intelligence, vision and action. He cancer he’d weathered in 2009, he was biologist David Anderson at the California thought about this in terms of coding and considering how his unique brand of mission- Institute of Technology, Paul and his sister programming. What is the code used for per- oriented, team-based science could answer Jody Allen started the Allen Brain Atlas in ception? Can our cognitive abilities — visual some of biology’s most persistent mysteries 2003 at the Allen Institute for Brain Science perception, short- and long-term memory, — in evolution, development, neuroscience, in Seattle. With the leadership of cell biolo- planning, reasoning, imagination, language immunology, health and ecology. As captured gist Allan Jones, the project was delivered on and so on — be conceived of as applets run- in the title of his 2011 autobiography, Paul was time and under budget in 2006, and yielded a ning on the highly specialized hardware ever the Idea Man. ■ map of the spatial expression of 20,000 genes of the brain? What can theories of cortical throughout the entire brain of the adult computation teach us about the brain? Can Christof Koch is president and chief laboratory mouse, in a highly reproducible we engineer cortical circuits in a dish? What scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain 3D framework. is the difference between natural and arti- Science in Seattle, Washington, USA. The Allen Brain Atlas fulfils what biologist ficial intelligence? (Paul started the Allen e-mail: [email protected] 474 | NATURE | VOL 563 | 22 NOVEMBER 2018©2018 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All ri ghts reserved. .