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(by Gautam Naik and Andrew Ackerman, The Wall Street Journal) WASHINGTON – The ambitious project to map the human brain that President Barack Obama detailed Tuesday faces uncertain funding and scientific challenges that could impede its success.
The project, first unveiled in February, is proposed to receive $100 million for its first year under next week’s White House budget plan. Mr. Obama acknowledged that Washington’s strained politics and tight finances [he is referring to necessary budget cuts] may make it difficult to ultimately secure that funding.
“None of this will be easy,” Mr. Obama said in outlining the initiative, dubbed BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies). “But think about what we could do once we do crack this code.”
Such a brain map could improve the treatment of schizophrenia, epilepsy and other disorders. The money mainly would be used to develop novel technologies to produce images showing the brain at work – how, for example, a memory gets formed, how it is stored and how it is retrieved.
The scientific hurdles include the fact that there are as many neurons, or nerve cells, in the human brain – about 100 billion – as there are stars in the Milky Way. The neurons are linked by about 150 trillion connections known as synapses.
Some estimates suggest that if current technology were used, it would take years to map the roughly 10,000 synapses that branch from just a single neuron. By comparison, the sequencing of the first human genome involved the mapping of only three billion base-pair sequences of DNA.
Javier Provencio, a neurologist who specializes in brain injuries at the Cleveland Clinic, thinks the project will yield benefits but is unlikely to provide a complete map of the brain.
“For very simple things like going from thinking about your arm to actually moving your arm, it’s a pretty straightforward system, and we know what the connections are,” Dr. Provencio said. “Now try [understanding the circuitry] behind hunger, or being scared.…It’s simplistic to say we’re going to map all of that.”
Unlike the effort to decode the human genome, or the project to put a man on the moon, the mapping of the human brain is a fuzzy endeavor, with no obvious milestones along the way. And because it could cost billions of dollars over several decades to build a comprehensive brain map, long-term funding could be another challenge.
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins noted that the government-funded Human Genome Project he led was kick-started with $28 million in its first year, and he said $100 million was enough to launch the brain-mapping plan.
“Until we really lay out what the milestones are, it will be very difficult to say what the right budget” is for the long term, Dr. Collins said.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), signaled Republicans are unlikely to back new spending to pay for the initiative. “This is exciting, important research and it would be appropriate for the White House to reprioritize existing research funding into these areas,” he said.
Any initial money would be split among the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, and the National Science Foundation.
In recent years, both public and private efforts have begun to map the basic wiring of the brain. The main idea behind the new U.S. government-led project is to come up with technology for exploring how the brain records, processes, stores and retrieves information.
Brain researchers elsewhere could benefit from any such advances. At the private Allen Institute for Brain Science, for example, scientists are trying to understand how the mouse brain processes visual information. One of their tools is a laser that can activate a neuron in the animal’s brain.
“The BRAIN initiative could refine [this technique] or come up with novel technologies” that may do the job a lot faster and more efficiently, said Allan Jones, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute.
Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted here for educational purposes only. Visit the website at wsj.com.
Questions
1. How much money does President Obama want to spend in the first year to launch the BRAIN program?
2. What does the President say is the purpose of BRAIN?
3. What are the problems associated with being able to successfully map the brain?
4. For the BRAIN program, what are:
- the milestones researchers expect to produce?
- the timetable for achieving this goal?
- the total cost of successfully meeting the goal?
5. Sequestration (the automatic cuts in the federal budget) took effect recently, intended to do something about the national debt, which a month ago was $16.5 trillion and growing. Congress and the president were supposed to come up with cuts of at least $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. (NOTE: the national debt equals the amount of money the government spends above the amount of taxes it collects)
a) Do you support the launch of a program that will cost taxpayers $100 million the first year alone if a potential outcome is to improve the treatment of some disorders/diseases? Explain your answer.
b) Where should the government get the money to pay for BRAIN? Explain your answer(s).
- cut government funding from another program
- raise taxes
- look to private industry to conduct this research
- hold a fund-raising drive to raise the needed funds
- from President Obama’s Organizing for Action non-profit group (which he created when he restructured his reelection campaign into a tax-exempt non-profit organization – something no other president has done).
6. How do Republicans in Congress view President Obama’s proposal to spend $100 million on brain map research, according to spokesman Michael Steele?
7. Read the “Background” below the questions about the National Institutes of Health.
a) How much does the federal government give the NIH each year?
b) Do you think it is part of the federal government’s job to fund medical research? Explain your answer.
c) If a medical research project had the potential of finding a treatment or cure for a disease(s), do you think private companies would be able to secure private funding to conduct the research? Explain your answer.
Background
National Institutes of Health (NIH):
- As of 2010, Congress increased the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget to $31 billion per year.
- The NIH is an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research.
- Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation.
- The NIH comprises 27 separate institutes, centers, and offices which includes the Office of the Director. Francis S. Collins is the current Director.
- As of 2003, the NIH was responsible for 28% – about $26.4 billion – of the total biomedical research funding spent annually in the U.S., with most of the rest coming from industry. (In other words, almost 30% of all medical research done in the U.S. is paid for by tax dollars.)
- The goal of NIH research is to acquire new knowledge to help prevent, detect, diagnose, and treat disease and disability, from the rarest genetic disorder to the common cold.
- The NIH mission is to uncover new knowledge that will lead to better health for everyone. NIH works toward that mission by conducting research in its own laboratories, supporting the research of non-federal scientists (in universities, medical schools, hospitals, and research institutions throughout the country and abroad), helping in the training of research investigators, and fostering communication of medical and health sciences information. (from wikipedia)
From an Associated Press report on President Obama’s proposal:
The White House said in a statement that the goal of the [BRAIN] project is “to revolutionize our understanding of the human mind” and create jobs.
President Obama mentioned the idea in his State of the Union address, comparing the scientific and economic potential to the Human Genome Project that was launched as an international effort in 1990 to better understand the genetic impact on health and disease.
“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy. Every dollar,” Obama said in the address to Congress in February. “Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s.
“Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation,” Obama said. “Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.”
The goals of the work are unclear at this point. A working group at NIH, co-chaired by Cornelia “Cori” Bargmann of The Rockefeller University and William Newsome of Stanford University, would work on defining the goals and developing a multi-year plan to achieve them that included cost estimates.
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