U.S. President Barack Obama presented yesterday the BRAIN Initiative ("Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies"), a fifteen-year research project whose goal is to draw the map of the activity and functions of the human brain, the organ hitherto unknown.
The project, also commonly referred to as the Brain Activity Map Project, will start in 2014 with an initial investment of 100 million dollars (77 million euros). According to “The New York Times”, this figure will rise to 3,000 million dollars (2,300 million euros) for the whole period. Obama's announcement comes two months after the European Union decided to invest 1,000 million euros in the Human Brain Project.
This multi-billion dollar U.S. investment has placed the BRAIN project as the most ambitious scientific research since United States launched the Human Genome Project, in which the American government invested 3.800 million dollars between 1990 and 2003. The profit generated by this research has risen to 800.000 million dollars so far.
With over 100,000 million neurons, the brain remains a challenge for the XXI century scientific research. In the last decades, the study techniques were still too invasive and the neuronal tissue rots quickly and it is complex to dissect.
However, BRAIN's team, led by the Spanish scientist Rafael Yuste, consider that current technology already allows researchers to study of the organ without interfering too much into it.
"Ours is a nation of dreamers, of people who take risks," Obama said at one press conference held at the White House on April 2 to launch the project.
"Now is the time to reach a level of research and development that has not been seen since the most intense times of the space race," said the U.S. president, to an audience of scientists and entrepreneurs.
"As humans we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than the atom, but we still haven't unlocked the mystery of the 3lb of matter that sits between our ears, which hosts 100,000 million neurons with billions of connections," Obama continued.
The brain, target of other large research initiatives
The study of the brain has fascinated researchers since ancient times. Over 2,000 years ago, the Athenian philosopher Aristotle established that the brain was less important than the heart or the liver, despite being the largest organ of the nervous system. However, the brain regained its prominence in the Middle Ages, when Christian and Muslim scholars set the memory and intellect in it, two aspects that BRAIN project now hopes to study further.
In late January, the European Commission selected the human brain and the graphene as the two objects of research in which the European Union will focus until 2020. This institution said it would invest 1,000 million euros in the Human Brain Project, with the participation of scientists from at least 15 EU countries led by Henry Markram (Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland). They will study the brain activity and possible treatments for mental illness using the world's largest brain experimental laboratory, to be built soon.
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