By Muming Poo, the director of ION:As part of a major drive for excellence in basic research in the new millennium, the Chinese Academy of Sciences founded the Institute of Neuroscience (ION) on November 27, 1999. The institute is devoted to research in all areas of basic neuroscience, including molecular, cellular and developmental neurobiology, systems and computational neuroscience, as well as cognitive and behavioral neuroscience. At its inception, the Institute aims to establish the infrastructure of a modern research institute that provides an environment for rigorous scientific pursuit and fruitful interactions, a merit-based system for promotion and funding, and a high-quality training program for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The institute currently has 25 laboratories in various areas of molecular, cellular and systems neurobiology. We are recruiting new laboratory heads at a rate of 2-3 per year, with a goal of reaching a steady state of 50 laboratories by 2020. The structure and function of the brain pose the ultimate challenge to human understanding of nature. Despite the spectacular progress in molecular and cellular biology over the last few decades, mysteries of the brain remain largely unsolved. Solution of these mysteries requires integration of experimental approaches from diverse disciplines and new conceptual frameworks that bridge understandings at different levels. The goal and agenda of neuroscience in the coming decades epitomize those of modern science - to understand nature is to understand how a natural phenomenon emerges from the properties of its constituent parts, and any description of a neural phenomenon, whether it is at the cognitive, circuit, cellular, or molecular level, is incomplete and unsatisfactory without addressing its causal links to the phenomena at a higher or lower level.