Thursday, April 4, 2013

Obama's BRAIN Initiative

On the 2nd April, President Obama has made a speech about a new initiative to study the brain. This new initiative is called BRAIN - Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.This initiative has been inspired in the Genome Project. His speech can be seen here or read here.



For me, the most important remark was: "So there is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked, and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. " My work is close to this idea using, of course, medical imaging, so I am really interested in this initiative.




About the budget involved, it might be considerably smaller than the Genome Project (3.8 billion), but the announced kick-start for the project was about 100$ million, while for the Genome Project was 28$ million. This kick-start will fund projects in the scope of the initiative: 50$ million from DARPA, 40$ million from NIH and 20$ million from NSF. Private sector will also contribute about 158$ million: 60$ million from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, 30$ million from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 28$ million from Salk Institute for Biological Studies and 4$ million from the Kavli Foundation, among others.

White House links: Blog, Fact Sheet and Infographics

2 comments:

  1. The brain initiative is nothing more that law enforcement implanting people with microchips to enable ubiquitous surveillance. They imprint your brain so they know what you are thinking 24/7. They see through your eyes what you see and hear what you hear. They also have installed yagi antennas to record every stroke of your keyboard through ubiquitous computing. There is no privacy. They electronically rape and sodomize you. They disfigure your body. Then you get cancer from the microchip, they remove the cancer, but refuse to remove the microchip. It causes cancer. They put salt in your water and potassium in your food. It's no match for the gamma radiation! The police in Newport News and the Virginia State Police are murdering people everyday - and getting rich!

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    1. I really enjoyed your comment! I had a smile in my face when I finished reading it. Maybe you should read more in this blog about medical imaging and realize that medical imaging is quite unharmful!

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