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Washington: Saying
that he wanted the next job-creating discoveries to happen not in
India or China, but the US, President Barack Obama has unveiled a
$100 million initiative to unlock the "enormous mystery" of the
human brain.
"I don't want the next job-creating discoveries to happen in China
or India or Germany. I want them to happen right here, in the
United States of America," the president said Tuesday in an event
in the East Room of the White House.
"And that's part of what this BRAIN Initiative is about," he said
referring to the initiative, dubbed Brain Research through
Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies.
"That's why we're pursuing other 'grand challenges' like making
solar energy as cheap as coal or making electric vehicles as
affordable as the ones that run on gas," Obama said.
"What if computers could respond to our thoughts? Or language
barriers could come tumbling down? Or if millions of Americans
were suddenly finding new jobs in these fields -- jobs we haven't
even dreamt up yet because we chose to invest in this project?
That is the future we are imagining. That is what we are hoping
for," he said.
"There is this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked," Obama
said, "and the BRAIN Initiative will change that by giving
scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the
brain in action and better understand how we think and how we
learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be -- will be
-- transformative."
BRAIN "aims to help researchers find new ways to treat, cure, and
even prevent brain disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease,
epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury", the White House said in a
release.
The money to study the brain would support research by the
National Institutes of Health, the Defence Advanced Research
Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. The research
would involve both federal research agencies and private partners.
A major goal is to reveal "how individual brain cells and complex
neural circuits interact at the speed of thought", the White House
said.
"Our ultimate objective is a deep understanding of the human brain
and its understanding," said DARPA director Arati Prabhakar in a
conference call with reporters.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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