The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to
examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of
its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.
The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as
early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and
teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to
advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain
greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately,
Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way
to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses.
Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.
The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is
expected to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month. And,
four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they
had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity
The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money
would be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal
constraint or how far the research would be able to get without
significant federal financing.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should “invest in the best ideas.”
“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our
economy — every dollar,” he said. “Today our scientists are mapping the
human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing
drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make
batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these
job-creating investments in science and innovation.”
Story C. Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological
Disorders and Stroke, said that when she heard Mr. Obama’s speech, she
thought he was referring to an existing National Institutes of Health
project to map the static human brain. “But he wasn’t,” she said. “He
was referring to a new project to map the active human brain that the
N.I.H. hopes to fund next year.”
Indeed, after the speech, Francis S. Collins, the director of the
National Institutes of Health, may have inadvertently confirmed the plan
when he wrote in a Twitter message: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.”
A spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy declined to comment about the project.
The initiative, if successful, could provide a lift for the economy.
“The Human Genome Project was on the order of about $300 million a year
for a decade,” said George M. Church,
a Harvard University molecular biologist who helped create that project
and said he was helping to plan the Brain Activity Map project. “If you
look at the total spending in neuroscience and nanoscience that might
be relative to this today, we are already spending more than that. We
probably won’t spend less money, but we will probably get a lot more
bang for the buck.”
Scientists involved in the planning said they hoped that federal
financing for the project would be more than $300 million a year, which
if approved by Congress would amount to at least $3 billion over the 10
The Human Genome Project cost $3.8 billion. It was begun in 1990 and its
goal, the mapping of the complete human genome, or all the genes in
human DNA, was achieved ahead of schedule, in April 2003. A federal
government study of the impact of the project indicated that it returned
$800 billion by 2010.
The advent of new technology that allows scientists to identify firing
neurons in the brain has led to numerous brain research projects around
the world. Yet the brain remains one of the greatest scientific
Composed of roughly 100 billion neurons that each electrically “spike”
in response to outside stimuli, as well as in vast ensembles based on
conscious and unconscious activity, the human brain is so complex that
scientists have not yet found a way to record the activity of more than a
small number of neurons at once, and in most cases that is done
invasively with physical probes.
But a group of nanotechnologists and neuroscientists say they believe
that technologies are at hand to make it possible to observe and gain a
more complete understanding of the brain, and to do it less intrusively.
In June in the journal Neuron, six leading scientists proposed pursuing a number of new approaches for mapping the brain.
One possibility is to build a complete model map of brain activity by
creating fleets of molecule-size machines to noninvasively act as
sensors to measure and store brain activity at the cellular level. The
proposal envisions using synthetic DNA as a storage mechanism for brain
“Not least, we might expect novel understanding and therapies for diseases such as schizophrenia and autism,”
wrote the scientists, who include Dr. Church; Ralph J. Greenspan, the
associate director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the
University of California, San Diego; A. Paul Alivisatos, the director of
the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Miyoung Chun, a molecular
geneticist who is the vice president for science programs at the Kavli
Foundation; Michael L. Roukes, a physicist at the California Institute
of Technology; and Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia
The Obama initiative is markedly different from a recently announced
European project that will invest 1 billion euros in a Swiss-led effort
to build a silicon-based “brain.” The project seeks to construct a
supercomputer simulation using the best research about the inner
workings of the brain.
Critics, however, say the simulation will be built on knowledge that is still theoretical, incomplete or inaccurate.
The Obama proposal seems to have evolved in a manner similar to the
Human Genome Project, scientists said. “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,” Dr. Church said.
However, a number of scientists said that mapping and understanding the
human brain presented a drastically more significant challenge than
mapping the genome.
“It’s different in that the nature of the question is a much more
intricate question,” said Dr. Greenspan, who said he is involved in the
brain project. “It was very easy to define what the genome project’s
goal was. In this case, we have a more difficult and fascinating
question of what are brainwide activity patterns and ultimately how do
they make things happen?”
The initiative will be organized by the Office of Science and Technology
Policy, according to scientists who have participated in planning
The National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation
will also participate in the project, the scientists said, as will
private foundations like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy
Chase, Md., and the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle.
A meeting held on Jan. 17 at the California Institute of Technology was
attended by the three government agencies, as well as neuroscientists,
nanoscientists and representatives from Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm.
According to a summary of the meeting, it was held to determine whether
computing facilities existed to capture and analyze the vast amounts of
data that would come from the project. The scientists and technologists
concluded that they did.
They also said that a series of national brain “observatories” should be
created as part of the project, like astronomical observatories.
JOHN MARKOFF from NY Times