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Medical [Medical] Brain Initiative Unveiled
2013.04.14 06:38
Report by Lauren Wolf & Susan Morrissey "Chemical & Engineering News," April 8, 2013 The White House announced last week a new initiative to help understand the workings of the human brain. With a proposed initial federal investment of $100 million, President Obama called the effort to map the dynamics of human nerve cells the "next great American Project." "As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away; we can study particles smaller than an atom," Obama said, "But we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the three pound of matter that sits between our ears." The Brain Initiative aims to follow in the footsteps of the Human Genome Project. ... The federal investment for the first year of funding for the genome project, 1988, was only $28 million. As proposed, three agencies will participate in the initiative. They are the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the NIH, and the National Science Foundation. The initiative will have support from private partners, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Kavli Foundation, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. A group of neuroscientists has been charged with coming up with a plan, specific goals, and an estimated milestone time frame for the project. The initiative will build on recent studies in neuroscience research. For instance, researchers can now record the firing of a few thousand neurons in animals. And they can get a coarse-grained look at how regions of the human brain are connected by using techniques such as functional MRI. But the human brains contains 85 billion neurons, and |