Obama Administration to Invest in Brain Mapping
President Obama recently announced his administration’s next big investment: human brain mapping. While the President made several mentions on the topic during his State of the Union, new details have been released regarding the decade-long initiative to create the most-detailed map of an active human brain to date.
Obama’s reasoning behind the program, which will cost billions of dollars, was to replicate the economic benefits of the human genome mapping project. The $3.8 billion dollar investment in the Human Genome Project reportedly saw a return of $800 billion.
“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” said the President. The “Brain Activity Map,” as it’s being called, will be included in the budget proposal set to be released in March.
The project is expected to generate detailed findings which would aid in the understanding of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and the creation of artificial intelligence.
Flickr photo courtesy of Foxtongue
