Obama outlines private-public project to study the brain
Patterned after the Human Genome Project, the BRAIN initiative aims to make an unprecedented study of the human brain. Most of the federal-private funding, however, remains to be worked out.
By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times
April 2, 2013, 7:48 p.m.
Making good on a promise first hinted at during his
State of the Union speech in February, President
Obama on Tuesday unveiled the broad outlines of a scientific initiative aimed at mapping the human brain. The project's ambitious goals include understanding how the brain forms memories and controls human behavior; how it becomes damaged by conditions such as
Parkinson's disease and
autism; and how it can be repaired when afflicted by
Alzheimer's disease,
post-traumatic stress disorder and other illnesses.
The BRAIN initiative — short for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies — is modeled after the Human Genome Project, in which the federal government partnered with philanthropies and scientific entrepreneurs to identify and characterize the nearly 25,000 genes that make up human DNA.
