Is a federal brain-mapping project just pie in the sky? The White House will soon unveil a major initiative to map brain cell activity. The effort, led by the National Institutes of Health, could be on the scale Relevant Products/Services of the war on cancer in the 1970s or the Human Genome Project of the '90s, which mapped the human genetic blueprint.
"This is not a project yet. It is more like an idea," says Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. "The brain is the last great frontier. It's what makes us human, how we think, how we write poetry. And the burden of disease that affects the brain is pretty extraordinary."
Yet the proposal has triggered disagreement among neuroscientists over whether such an effort is warranted or whether it threatens other, more vital research. The debate comes amid intense competition for federal research grants among biomedical researchers, who have seen the National Institutes of Health's $31 billion budget stay flat in recent years after a period of doubling in the past decade.
"We are right on the edge of finding out really vital information Relevant Products/Services about the brain," says Brown University neuroscientist John Donoghue, who was part of the project team. "There are questions we can now answer that can only be tackled as a collaborative project," not by individual labs.
But other researchers such as Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University in New York have criticized the ambition and potential cost.
"We don't understand the fly brain yet. How will this come to anything?" Vosshall asked
Researchers Debate Wisdom of Brain-Mapping Idea | Sci-Tech Today