On April 2, President Obama announced a new initiative to “revolutionize our understanding of the human brain”. It is hoped that the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative will “accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought”.
Interested in more detail? Susan L. Nasr provides an in-depth look at what brain mapping is and what it can do for us.
To pay for this research, the President has so far committed over $100 million of the 2014 budget to the initiative, with the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation all contributing some of their funding to this effort. Several private sector partners have committed an additional $122 million, and the White House hopes to bring in more partners to collaborate on the project moving forward.
Of course, the bold new initiative has received a fair amount of criticism as well. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Dr. Gregory Sorensen, formerly a professor of radiology at Harvard and now the CEO of Siemens Healthcare, argues that the initiative’s success may suffer as a result of the new taxes that the medical-technology industry must now pay under the Affordable Care Act, which he says takes money away from research and innovation. Dr. Kelly Bulkeley has another perspective on the HuffPost Blog regarding the ethical challenges of the initiative, and asks how much data will be publicly available, who will be monitoring for potential abuses of these new findings, and other important questions. Others have been more vehemently opposed to this endeavor, leading Society for Neuroscience president Larry Swanson to send a letter to the society’s 42,000 members, urging them to use appropriate channels for debate and refrain from negative comments, so as not to “risk smothering the initiative before it gets started”.