President Barack Obama proposed to spend $100m on a new effort to study and map the human brain, dubbing it the “next great American project” and demanding US congressional approval for the funding despite federal budget constraints.
The plan, which will be led by the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, was announced by Mr Obama at the White House on Tuesday morning.
“You know, as humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, 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,” Mr Obama said.
According to the White House, the project “ultimately aims to help researchers find new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and traumatic brain injury”.
Mr Obama had hinted at the effort in his State of the Union address in February, in which he asked Congress to help the US “reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race”.
The president also pointed to how the project could stimulate the economy in a similar way that the Human Genome Project did more than a decade ago and keep the US competitive in the race for innovation with other countries. “We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead. We have to seize them,” he said. “I don’t want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China or India or Germany; I want them to happen right here, in the United States of America.”
Republicans have, in general, been opposed to any new federal spending programmes, dubbing them unaffordable at a time when budgetary restraint is needed to trim high deficits and cut America’s debt load. But medical research is one of the toughest areas of government spending to oppose, given its popularity and impact, meaning that it could be grounds for some compromise.
A spokesman for John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, offered a relatively positive reaction, but cautioned that the money should come out of other scientific research projects, which could pit other segments of medical research against it. “This is exciting, important research and it would be appropriate for the White House to reprioritise existing research funding into these areas,” the spokesman said.
According to the White House, the initiative, which will be part of next week’s 2014 administration budget proposal, “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”.
It added: “These technologies will open new doors to explore how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light on the complex links between brain function and behaviour.”
The White House brought in several private sector partners to help launch the plan, including the Allen Institute for Brain Science, which was launched by Paul Allen, the former Microsoft executive. Also on board is the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in the Washington suburbs.
The development of a new technology known as optogenetics, enabling neuroscientists to manipulate brain activity with light, has been key to reaching a point where such a project can be undertaken.
The $100m in funding is requested for the 2014 fiscal year, which begins in October, and will have to be approved by congressional appropriators, meaning it could well fall victim to the rolling budget wars in the US capital.
Since the US will be operating under discretionary spending caps, and possibly even further cuts if sequestration is not reversed, even if the funding for the brain project is given the green light, the money will have to be removed from other programmes at the NIH or other government agencies.
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