How much would it be worth to find a cure for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease? What about developing new therapies for mental illness? Would advancing the ball on artificial intelligence be worth spending tax dollars on?
And do we really want to understand the origins and meaning of consciousness itself?
Scientists have proposed creating a gigantic project to literally map the brain — a 10 year effort “seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics” as the New York Times avers.
The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president’s budget proposal next month. And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project.
The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money would be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal constraint or how far the research would be able to get without significant federal financing.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should “invest in the best ideas.”
“Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,” he said. “Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.”
Story C. Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said that when she heard Mr. Obama’s speech, she thought he was referring to an existing National Institutes of Health project to map the static human brain. “But he wasn’t,” she said. “He was referring to a new project to map the active human brain that the N.I.H. hopes to fund next year.”
Indeed, after the speech, Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, may have inadvertently confirmed the plan when he wrote in a Twitter message: “Obama mentions the #NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.”
A spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy declined to comment about the project.
In a time of severely restricted budgets, the president is probably not going to get all that he wants in funding this project. That’s a shame. The potential for this project to revolutionize science and, indeed, our understanding of the essence of our humanity — consciousness — is the kind of thing that the federal government should support.
This is pure research. It’s the sort of thing that coprorations can’t or won’t touch because there is no guaranteed pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. We know that there will be a payoff — as with the Human Genome Project — we just can’t put a finger on exactly where it will be. All that is certain is that whatever tax dollars are spent, we will see a healthy return on that investment in the form of new jobs, and perhaps even new industries.
Additionally, the cause of advancing human knowledge is always a worthy goal. It’s why we spend money on launching rockets carrying sophisticated instruments into space to study the mysteries of the universe. Whatever ancillary commercial benefits accrue from the space program, seeking the answer to the questions of the cosmos is a valuable — some would argue even necessary — function of government.
Congress should give this proposal serious consideration.
They just want to qualify conservatism as a mental disorder.
Speculation:
The brain is a wonderfully complex device. The part that astounds me is how every memory “cell” seems to always being playing the game of bingo, monitoring incoming stimuli and raising its hand if it is pertinent, if it thinks it has completed a row, in a way that reminds me of simultaneous linear equations, or parallel computing–except that it is just simultaneous games of pattern recognition, on a massive scale.
While at the same time the brain is possibly constantly rerouting the active pathways, almost like Voltaire sleeping in a different room everynight, or, better yet, a farmer fallowing his fields every third season, and rotating the crops the other two. And thus the problem of Alzheimer’s. If you are routinely changing the active net as a maintenance feature (so as to detect intruders/damage, in a way akin to motion detectors), what do you do when you can no longer get back to the memory you need?
And is dreaming basically a bit check of pathways, a test of functionality, as well as a way to both reduce and store the salience of the schema most recently pressing, and thus most prominent?
It is not at all known what there is to map.
This is monumental silliness.
Charlie Rose has been a big fan of “brain” topics, has run multi-day specials with elite researchers for several years – and it all comes to nothing.
It’d be like giving a computer to a group of chimps and expecting them to map it. This one would make Solyndra look like genius.
Frankly, even the human genome project has turned out to be much less immediately useful than originally thought. The topic is just a whole lot harder than most understood, back at the beginning. The genome project was completed years early, as the sequencing technology advanced faster than the original technology could move.
What is needed now is a full model of the entirety of human physiology, several orders of magnitude larger than the genome project and not likely to be short-circuited like that.
Frankly, even the scale or scope of what a “brain mapping” project would be, is totally unknown. Only amateurs, ignoramousii, and academic researchers hungry for the cash no matter how fraudulently, could back such an idea.
Such highly detailed knowledge of how the brain works would be dangerous enough in the hands of corporations and their advertizing departments. In the hands of government it would be absolutely terrifying. Just look at how both already abuse such knowledge as they have now: increasingly seductive commercials, slick propaganda hidden in TV shows, and software that predicts your behavior. Yeah, it would be totally safe to let government have all the keys to your brain.
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence,promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Unless you lump this under the heading of “general Welfare” (the most overused, unjustly distended, flaccid term in the Constitution), I see no justification for this being the concern of the government.