Technology

Make a list of common boyhood dreams and Paul Allen will very likely have lived most of them. Start your own company and make a gazillion dollars? Check. Own two professional sports teams? Check. Play lead guitar in rock band? Check. Build a rocket to fly people into space? Check. Make giant telescope to search for aliens? Check. Crack the mystery of the human brain? Well, he’s working on it.

The seminal moment in the life of one of the world’s wealthiest men is often pegged as the time, in 1975, when he persuaded his high school friend Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard University and cofound a company called Microsoft. But since leaving the software giant in 1983 after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma—and then facing down the disease—Allen has lived a dizzying array of second lives. Drawing on his Microsoft-stock fortune, today estimated at $22 billion, he has funded dozens of companies in the software, cable, and Web industries, bought the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Seahawks, and built Seattle’s Experience Music Project, the rock-and-roll history museum. Along the way, Allen has also become a leading patron of the sciences, whose influence can rival that of huge government agencies.

(Courtesy of Brian Smale)

Back when he was a high school guitar player obsessed with software, Allen was mesmerized by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World. Thirty years later, he started steering his fortune toward projects that could easily belong in those movies. In 2001 his $11.5 million investment helped jump-start the SETI program, a methodical search for radio signals from intelligent life. (The new Allen Telescope Array will start sweeping the sky for aliens this year.) His love of rockets spurred a $30 million gamble on SpaceShipOne, which won the X Prize as the first manned craft in suborbital space. In 2003 Allen doled out $100 million to found the Allen Institute for Brain Science, with the ambitious goal of mapping all gene expression in the mammalian brain. Last September the institute released a complete genomic map of the mouse brain—a free, searchable, three-dimensional analysis of 21,000 genes (including 85 million images) that will help neuroscientists understand how different regions of the brain operate and interact. Now Allen plans to move on to the big prize: mapping the human neocortex.

In his Seattle office—with a glass-encased replica of his 416-foot yacht, the Octopus, in front of him and the Seahawks’ stadium visible from the window—Allen spoke with DISCOVER about funding priorities, Microsoft memories, and which childhood dream he plans to check off next.

Do you ever wonder what the world would be like today if Microsoft had never existed?
Whoa. If Microsoft had never existed. . . . The industry would probably be very fragmented. But there are so many new models that have sprung up—things like the iPod, Google, YouTube, eBay, and Amazon. So it’s like asking, “What if there wasn’t an Amazon?” Well, there would probably be other people online selling books, but would it have the impact of an Amazon? Probably not. Or what if there were five companies doing online auctions and not just eBay? For users, there may be a bigger variety of things to choose from, but whenever you have scale, obviously you have more of a chance to make it a better product. The bigger you get, the more inertia you have, which is good. On the other hand, you don’t want to get so big that you struggle to get releases out. So there is always that tension.

Has your experience with Microsoft shaped the kinds of scientific projects you are supporting today?
In a way. In the computer industry, you’ve got an interdisciplinary team of people who can come together, attack the problem, and work in a collaborative style. You knock down one problem after another, cobble things together, and then hopefully turn the crank at some point. This is what we did with the mouse brain project.

“The human brain works in a completely different fashion from a computer and does some things so much better. . . . How can that be?"

Your interest in the workings of the brain seems like a logical step for someone who started out writing software.
Yeah, if you are involved in computers, at some point you end up being fascinated by the idea of the human brain. The human brain works in a completely different fashion from a computer and does some things so much better than a computer, and this may remain true for the next 100, 200 years. How can that be? So I brought a bunch of neuroscientists together and asked, “What can I do that would be interesting and different that would potentially help the field of neuroscience move forward?” The answer was a genetic database of the mouse brain.

The Allen Brain Atlas is, at heart, a massive data-archiving project. Is this type of research a trend in science?
It’s kind of industrial-scale science, where the output, the product, is a database. I think we are already seeing some efforts to do genetic databases of cancer; I believe there is a Harvard effort under way. Craig Venter has his project where he collects seawater [in an effort to catalog ocean life]. But we are probably only talking about dozens of these kinds of databases at this point. That may end up being naive a few decades from now.

What’s next at the Allen Institute for Brain Science?
There are still parts of the mouse brain that we need to explore: the developmental mouse brain, the female brain differences. Then we are starting to scale up to the human brain. It’s so much bigger than the mouse brain, which is kind of an almond-size thing. You need bigger slides, more digital capacity. And of course there is no uniform strain—thank goodness—of human beings, like there is of mice. But I think trying to parse out the detailed genetics and structure of the brain will go a long way to understanding how it works.

What do you think are the chances of SETI’s succeeding—in other words, of finding intelligent life beyond our world?
The scientists are optimistic because they think that if they have better instruments that look deeper or on more frequencies, there should be civilizations out there broadcasting. I think everybody would admit it’s a long shot, but if that long shot comes in... wow.

If they do get the signal, will you be the first person they call?
Actually, first they call the White House. At one point they told me I was third or fourth on the list. So I guess that’s one of the benefits of funding the project. But the phone hasn’t rung yet.

What would that kind of discovery mean to you?
That would be such a life-changing thing, for us all to know that there are other beings out there who we could potentially communicate with, or maybe we are listening to a signal that they transmitted hundreds of millennia ago. And then we’d say, “Well, what was in the message? Can we decode the message, and can we communicate back? What are they really like? Are they oxygen-breathing bipeds, or are they a gas cloud on some gas-giant planet?”

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