The Human Brain Project (HBP) was launched in October 2013 by the European Commission to build an information and communication technology infrastructure that would support large-scale brain modelling and simulation. Less than a year after its launch, more than 800 neuroscientists signed a letter that claimed the HBP ‘would fail to meet its goals’. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between February 2014 and January 2017 in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the HBP headquarters in Switzerland, and over 40 interviews with scientists, engineers and project administrators, this article traces how competing visions over how brain models should be built became tied into debates over how scientific communities should be governed. Articulations of these different kinds of models and communities appealed to competing imaginaries of Europe itself – of Europe and European science as unified or pluralistic. This article argues that scientific models are sites of contestation over social and political futures. The tensions between visions of scientific unification and pluralism in the HBP mirrored the tensions between imaginaries of European political unification and pluralism.

欧盟委员会于2013年10月启动了“人脑计划”（HBP），以建立一个支持大规模脑部建模和仿真的信息和通信技术基础架构。该计划启动不到一年，就有800多名神经科学家签署了一封信，声称HBP“将无法实现其目标”。基于2014年2月至2017年1月在法国，德国，英国和瑞士HBP总部进行的多点民族志田野调查，以及对科学家，工程师和项目管理员的40多次访谈，本文追溯了关于大脑如何相互竞争的观点应该建立模型，成为有关如何管理科学共同体的辩论的纽带。这些不同类型的模型和社区的表述吸引了欧洲自身竞争的假想像，即欧洲和统一或多元的欧洲科学。本文认为，科学模型是争夺社会和政治未来的场所。HBP的科学统一和多元化观之间的紧张关系反​​映了欧洲政治统一和多元化想象中的紧张关系。