The New York Times reports that the Obama Administration is set
to announce a large-scale effort to map the activity of the
human brain, promising to do for brain research what the Human
Genome Project did for genetics. The decade-long project, likely
to cost billions of dollars, "is expected to be part of the
president's budget proposal next month," the Times reports.
While the White House declined to comment about the initiative,
four scientists who were involved in planning the project spoke
to the paper about it, including Harvard's George Church, who
said the concept emerged in a similar fashion to the Human
Genome Project. “The genome project arguably began in 1984,
where there were a dozen of us who were kind of independently
moving in that direction but didn’t really realize there were
other people who were as weird as we were,” he said. He noted
that the Brain Activity Map could provide a much-needed
financial boost for neuroscience. “The Human Genome Project was
on the order of about $300 million a