Massive budget to fund study of human brain

Washington – President Barack Obama yesterday outlined a government-sponsored initiative to map the human brain, casting it as a way to discover new cures for neurological diseases and to strengthen the economy.

‘‘Ideas are what power our economy,’’ Obama said. ‘‘When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else.’’

The project would use about US$100 million in federal money over the next fiscal year to begin a long-term effort to better understand the brain. Those funds will be included in Obama’s proposed budget, scheduled for release next week, and will be combined with annual private-sector investments of roughly an equal amount.

Obama has spoken frequently during his presidency, including in his most recent state of the union address, about using federal money in partnership with academia and business to foster projects with broader economic and social benefits. And the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative represents one of Obama’s most ambitious efforts to do so.

But the federal funding he has proposed would probably represent only seed money for a project that could take more than a decade to complete, as was the case with the programme to map the human genome, another collaboration between the federal government and the private sector.

Obama cited the computer chip and the internet as projects that began with government help, and he named Alzheimer’s disease, autism and post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American troops as among the afflictions that could be better understood, if not cured, through this initiative.