White House Unveils $100 Million BRAIN Initiative

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 Barack 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 3 lb of matter that sits between our ears.”

The initiative is part of the President’s proposed fiscal 2014 budget, which is expected to be released in full on April 10. Congress will have to sign off on the initiative through its appropriations process. It’s unclear how a new effort like this will fare in the current uncertain fiscal environment.

As proposed, three agencies will participate in the initiative, known as BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will contribute $50 million in a set of programs designed to study the dynamic functions of the brain and then use the results to develop applications. The National Institutes of Health will invest about $40 million mainly through its NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research initiative. And the National Science Foundation will spend some $20 million to fund related research.

The initiative will also include 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, supported by NIH, 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 strides 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 magnetic resonance imaging.

But the human brain contains 85 billion neurons, and those cells connect through an estimated 100 trillion junctions, or synapses. Many scientists have argued that until tools exist to monitor the simultaneous firing of millions of neurons or more, how the human brain functions—and dysfunctions—will remain a mystery. BRAIN will help understand the dynamic connectivity of nerve cells, which could help treat conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, in which faulty neuronal circuitry has been implicated.

The BRAIN Initiative aims to follow in the footsteps of the Human Genome Project. “Every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned $140 to our economy,” Obama said. The federal investment for the first year of funding for the genome project, 1988, was only $28 million.

Paul S. Weiss, a chemist and nanoscientist at UCLA who was involved in developing the proposal, says, “The ability to do these measurements is going to make a difference, not only for neuroscience, but also hopefully for people suffering from all kinds of neurological diseases.”