Is Obama’s Plan to Map the Human Brain this Generation’s Equivalent to Landing a Man on the Moon?
President John F. Kennedy’s mission in the 1960s was to land a man on the moon. President Bill Clinton made cracking the human genome one of his top priorities. Now, President Barack Obama says a detailed map of the human brain is necessary to understand how it works and what needs to be done when it’s not working properly. The president is expected to unveil his plans for an estimated $3 billion, decade-long commitment to the Brain Activity Map project next month in his 2014 budget proposal.
Rutgers Today talked with Rutgers University behavioral neuroscientist Timothy Otto, professor and director of the Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience program in the Department of Psychology, about what we know about the brain, how much we still need to discover and if spending billions of dollars in research will enable scientists to develop new treatments for debilitating neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and autism.
