Beattie promises $20m towards Qld brain institute

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has pledged that his government, if re-elected, will contribute AUD$20 million towards the cost of a $60 million brain research institute at the University of Queensland.

On the campaign trail in the lead-up to a February state election, Beattie said the new institute would be the first in the world established specifically to focus on understanding how the brain works.

Construction on the new brain institute is scheduled to begin early next year. When finished, it will accommodate 300 staff, including 240 scientists, and share the Queensland Bioscience Precinct with the Institute of Molecular Biosciences and the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology.

Beattie said the three institutes, which would collectively employ 1000 scientists, would join forces to create an international bioscience powerhouse rivalling those in San Diego, San Francisco and Boston.

The state's $20 million pledge is being matched by the University of Queensland and an unnamed philanthropic organisation.

Beattie has made no secret of his intention to make Queensland Australia's leading state in bioscience research, ahead of perennial power Victoria. Significantly, the new brain institute's director will be Prof Perry Bartlett, recruited by UQ from Victoria's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (WEHI) late in 2002.

Bartlett's research at WEHI showed that the brain could generate new neurons, refuting the long-established dogma, and opening a window on new therapeutic approaches to mental disorders, and brain diseases that involve the loss of neurons, like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neuron diseases.

Bartlett has since relocated his entire team of 15 neuroscience researchers to Brisbane, recruited another 15 neuroscientists from the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra, and imported five each another 10 -- five each from US Ivy League universities, Stanford and Harvard.

Beattie said that over the past decade, the University of Queensland had amassed the larges, most diverse and most successful population of neuroscientists in Australia.

"If the Queensland Brain Institute can find ways of preventing or better treating mental illnesses such as dementia, this will be of enormous social and economic benefit not just for Queensland but the rest of the world," the premier said in a statement. "During 1999-2000, Australia spent $2.6 billion dollars to treat mental health conditions. Diseases like Alzheimer's and depression are estimated to cost the United States economy more than $50 billion each year."