Obama to announce initiative to map human brain

The New York Times reports that President Barack Obama will unveil a broad new research initiative Tuesday, starting with $100 million next year, to find ways to record and map human brain circuits.

The New York Times: Obama To Unveil Initiative To Map The Human Brain
President Obama on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain, senior administration officials said Monday. A senior administration scientist compared the new initiative to the Human Genome Project, in that it is directed at a problem that has seemed insoluble up to now: the recording and mapping of brain circuits in action in an effort to "show how millions of brain cells interact." It is different, however, in that it has, as yet, no clearly defined goals or endpoint. Coming up with those goals will be up to the scientists involved and may take more than year (Markoff and Gorman, 4/2).