Obama Says Spending Money on Brain Research Will Create Jobs, Prosperity

Obama Launches BRAIN Initiative to Map the Human Brain (The Daily Beast)

We may not be colonizing Mars or putting another man on the moon, but the Obama administration took its first step toward Big Science innovation on Tuesday when it unveiled the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, along with a $100 million kick-start.

The BRAIN initiative’s goal is just as lofty as space travel: understanding and mapping the human brain.

“As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away,” Obama said at a press conference on Tuesday. “We can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.”

The scientific community has largely responded to the project with delight.

“I think this is a fantastic, historic day,” said Eric Kandel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuropsychiatrist at Columbia University.

Kandel and his peers were skeptical when they first heard about the project, worried that funding for small projects would be diverted to the federal program and that the project lacked structure, he said. But now he feels the project is in “excellent hands,” he added.

He also emphasized the potential the BRAIN initiative has globally. “Unlike going to the moon, this is an international enterprise,” he said. “If you cure Parkinson’s in New York City, you cure it all over the world.”