From: drarwingnuttephd@gmail.com   
      
   Obama's Brain Project Backs Neurotechnology   
   The U.S. announces $46 million to develop new technologies for exploring the   
   brain.   
      
   By Antonio Regalado on September 30, 2014   
   WHY IT MATTERS   
      
   The three-pound mass between our ears is the next great frontier for science.   
      
      
   The retinal nerve cells shown in this close-up transmit information to the   
   brain.   
      
   The White House said that President Obama's BRAIN Initiative is generating   
   interest from companies and philanthropies in a sign of what it calls a wider   
   partnership developing around the U.S. administration's most prominent science   
   initiative, first    
   unveiled in 2013.   
      
   The White House had committed to spending $100 million this year on the   
   project, which seeks to develop new technologies for studying the brain. As   
   part of that, today the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced $46   
   million in awards to 58 research    
   groups.   
      
   The diverse technologies the NIH is backing include development of a wearable   
   PET scanner, which could monitor patients' brains during everyday activities,   
   lasers able to control how neurons fire, and diamond-coated electrodes that   
   can detect the    
   neurotransmitter dopamine in living brains.   
      
   During a press briefing, NIH director Francis Collins said the research   
   grants  would speed the "development of exciting new tools and technologies to   
   understand how [brain] circuits work." He said the BRAIN Initiative could   
   spend $4.5 billion on such    
   neurotechnologies over the next decade or so.   
      
   The effort, whose full name is Brain Research through Advancing Innovative   
   Neurotechnologies, reflects a government strategy to invest widely in better   
   techniques to measure the brain. That's necessary not only because the brain's   
   functioning remains    
   enigmatic, but because it is difficult to study neurons in living animals,   
   limiting scientific progress.   
      
   Collins compared the NIH's approach to that taken during the Human Genome   
   Project, which he also oversaw starting in 1999. That effort was vastly   
   accelerated thanks to better technology for sequencing DNA. "There was a lot   
   of uncertainty, but it worked    
   out," said Collins. "No one can quite predict the twists and turns."   
      
   But the brain is so much more complex than DNA that several scientists said   
   the role for technology is not as clear cut this time. "With the Genome   
   Project, we knew what the technology needed to be. Here, we are not even sure   
   what technologies are most    
   useful because the questions still need to be defined," says Gerald Fischbach,   
   scientific director of the Simons Foundation, a private charity in New York   
   that is investing millions in brain science. Fischbach was not part of the NIH   
   announcement.   
      
   Around the world, other large neuroscience efforts have also had to pick where   
   to place their bets. In Europe, a heavily-funded Human Brain Project is   
   seeking to create large-scale computer simulations of the human brain,   
   although that strategy that has    
   been criticized as premature (see "Neuroscientists Object to Europe's Human   
   Brain Project").   
      
   One reason the U.S. project doesn't satisfy all neuroscientists is that it   
   strongly embraces the idea that there are "circuits" in the brain, or that one   
   neuron would excite another, and so on, leading to behaviors. While that   
   certainly happens, some say    
   the circuit analogy is an antiquated anatomical notion insufficient to explain   
   how the 86 billion neurons in the brain actually operate.   
      
   "But generating data is a good first step," says Konrad Kording, a   
   neuroscientist at Northwestern University.   
      
   The grants announced by the NIH support development of some proven   
   technologies, such as optogenetics, a technique to turn neurons on and off in   
   lab animals using light pulses. Elsewhere, the agency took bigger risks, like   
   the $539,000 it awarded to    
   develop a wearable PET scanner whose "ultimate goal is to be able to image   
   subjects during a proverbial 'walk in the park' and other natural activities,"   
   according to West Virginia University's Julie-Anne Brefczynski-Lewis, who is   
   one of about 100    
   scientists who will share in the NIH awards.   
      
   Separately, the White House held an event to highlight its efforts and what it   
   calls $300 million in ongoing private R&D investments in brain science. Groups   
   attending today's White House event included the Simons Foundation, which this   
   year    
   independently announced plans to spend $62 million to understand how brains   
   generate thought. Fischbach says that by convening different groups, the White   
   House hoped to demonstrate that "we can benefit from, or help the Obama   
   initiative."   
      
   "I don't know what is cause and what is effect, but it's a definitely hot   
   area," he says. "There has been an upswing in this type of neuroscience, which   
   is really quite remarkable."   
      
   4 COMMENTS. Share your thoughts >>   
   Credit: Photo by Josh Morgan, PhD and Rachel Wong, PhD | University of   
   Washington   
   Tagged: Biomedicine, neuroscience, President Obama, neurotechnology, BRAIN   
   initiative, National Institutes of Health   
      
      
      
   http://www.technologyreview.com/news/531291/obamas-brain-project   
   backs-neurotechnology/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsl   
   tter-weekly-biomedicine&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20141007   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)