Obama introduces $100 million brain mapping initiative

President Barack Obama exits the East Room following his BRAIN initiative unveiling. (Charles Dharapak/AP)

UPDATED 11:50 a.m. ET

President Barack Obama on Tuesday unveiled the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), a $100 million project aimed to increase understanding of the human brain.

The president, who publicly unveiled the program in the White House East Room, asked observers to imagine technology improving the lives of billions of people by reversing the effects of Parkinson's disease, epilepsy and traumatic brain injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder for military veterans.

"There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked" within the human brain, Obama said. And the BRAIN Initiative "will change that."

The initiative?a subject the president first referenced during his State of the Union address in January?would support technologies that map the brain in order to gain greater understanding of a variety of diseases in the hopes of leading to new cures, prevention and treatment, as well as the links between the brain and behavior.

But the president on Tuesday also promoted his program as an economic effort.

"Every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned $140 to our economy," Obama said.

The president also argued that efforts such as the BRAIN Initiative keep America ahead in innovation and help produce new discoveries that might otherwise be made in countries such as "China, India or Germany."

"Ideas are what power our economy," he said. "We do innovations better than anyone else."

The $100 million in government funds being spent on the program will be included in Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget to be released April 10. The funding breakdown includes: $40 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH); $50 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is part of the Department of Defense; and $20 million from the National Science Foundation.

Support will also be provided by private sector foundations.

Some critics have suggested that the cost of the program is too low when compared to other research initiatives, but in a phone call with reporters following the president's unveiling, Francis Collins, NIH director, said the amount is "substantial ... considering this is the first year" of the project.

It's a "pretty good start for getting this project off the ground," Collins said.

Still others, notably some Republicans and fiscal conservatives, suggested Tuesday that the country needs to re-evaluate federal funds already being spent on this subject and took issue with the price.

?Mapping the human brain is exactly the type of research we should be funding, by reprioritizing the $250 million we currently spend on political and social science research into expanded medical research, including the expedited mapping of the human brain," Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said in a statement. "It's great science."

Chris Moody contributed to this story

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-introduce-brain-mapping-initiative-132407332--politics.html

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