President's BRAIN Initiative is Set Up to Fail, says Potomac Institute for Policy Studies

ARLINGTON, Va., June 11, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The President's BRAIN Initiative will not deliver on its promises unless it is driven by greater, more robust goals. The current effort is reminiscent of the modest Human Genome Project that promised personalized medicine from the sequence of human DNA. Ten years after the project was declared a success, we are still waiting for cures to diseases and individualized medicine. The Human Genome Project did not live up to its expectations and neither will the BRAIN Initiative. We needed more than the sequence of the genome to cure disease and we will need more than a map of the brain to understand how we think. Both of these initiatives were sold as national science programs like the Space Race. But these initiatives are akin to building rockets and promising the moon. We needed much more than a plan to build rockets to put a man on the moon and bring him home. We needed much more than a gene sequence to cure disease. And we will need to do much more than the map of the brain to understand it. These initiatives have contained empty promises and it is time to make the real promise with the right goals.

We need a National Neurotechnology Initiative (NNTI) that requires $2B in yearly funding. Expanding the BRAIN Initiative to NNTI, we will achieve the goals of curing diseases and understanding brain function.  Mapping the brain is just one step in the process. We need to supplement the NIH investment with funding from each major government agency. Interdisciplinary research is an integral part to success in this national endeavor. Additionally, we need to create a National Coordinating Office that will oversee the investments from other agencies to synchronize the research efforts. Without continued coordination, we will lose sight of what we cherish most – our health, our minds, and our future. 

A few days ago, NIH released its BRAIN 2025 Report documenting their call for an investment of $400 million a year over the next ten years, totaling $4.5 billion. This is insufficient support in comparison to the amount of research funding we have allocated to other successful national science programs. The Race to the Moon, the Manhattan Project, and the Nanotechnology Initiative all commanded more than $21 billion (2014 dollars) in funding to reach their goals. The NNTI is the United States' next moon shot, the next research investment in revolutionary technologies, the last frontier.

Media Contacts:
Jennifer Buss, PhD, Director, Center for Neurotechnology Studies, [email protected]  
Kathryn Schiller Wurster, Chief of Staff, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, [email protected]

Jennifer Buss, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Neurotechnology Studies (CNS) at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. CNS has published a Neurotechnology Futures Roadmap outlining a National Neurotechnology Initiative. The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies is an independent, 501(c)(3), not-for-profit public policy research institute. 

SOURCE Potomac Institute for Policy Studies