BRAIN initiative is underway, funding new ways to map cells, circuits
Scientists will aim to capture the workings of the human brain in comprehensive recordings, to watch the brain while in motion and to reimagine the world’s most complex biological organism as a buzzing network of interlocking circuits with the award of $46 million in study grants announced Tuesday.
The announcement marks the first concrete steps taken under the Obama administration’s BRAIN Initiative, short for Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. Unveiled in April 2013, the initiative is a planned 12-year effort to spur new understanding of the brain in sickness and in health by improving technologies used to map, record, probe and stimulate its workings.
President Obama has sought $110 million for the BRAIN initiative in 2014 and $200 million for the 2015 fiscal year, which begins on Wednesday, with future years’ funding to be worked out. He has likened the initiative to the Human Genome Project, which has dramatically deepened understanding of the roles played by nearly 25,000 genes that make up human DNA, and has advanced medicine along a wide front.
On Tuesday, Obama administration officials revealed which researchers and universities will carry out the first federally funded projects under the initiative’s banner, naming more than 100 investigators in 15 states and several countries.
