Nervous system
BRAIN Game
02/04/13 16:21 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
US President Barack Obama announced his $100 million initiative called the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies or BRAIN Project. The project will involve a number of agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a so-called "dream team" of researchers led by Rockefeller University's Cori Bargmann and William Newsome from Stanford University will be developing a specific plan and goals for the project. S. Pelech acknowledges that a commitment to increase spending for neuroscience-based research is sorely needed, but it would appear from preliminary descriptions of the research program that very little of the new funding will actually be applied to the study of neurological diseases in humans. Read More...
Brain Project Draws Presidential Interest
20/02/13 16:14 Filed in: sciencemag.com
The New York Times reported that the Obama administration will in its next budget proposal seek to launch a potentially multi-billion dollar major research initiative, known as the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project to greatly expand understanding of the healthy and diseased human brain. S. Pelech cynically looks ahead to what proponents of the BAM project will say 10 years later about the success of the project. He notes that detailed mapping neuronal connections in the brain in the end will not really be that useful for rectifying the pathological processes that underlie the most common brain and spinal cord diseases, where it is the destruction of neurons and other supporting brain cells that actually leads to loss of brain function. Read More...
Billion-Dollar Brain Map
18/02/13 16:10 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration is set to announce a large-scale, decade-long project to map the activity of the human brain. Proponents such as George Church at Harvard University have argued that the Brain Activity Map could provide a much-needed financial boost for neuroscience in the order of $300 million a year. S. Pelech seriously questions the wisdom of diverting a significant amount of the limited resources available at this juncture for basic scientific research towards the specific goal of mapping brain activity patterns at the cellular level in high resolution. He notes a huge litany of issues ranging from technical, economic, and practical to profound ethical considerations associated with such a proposal. Read More...