US Joins Google, Microsoft In "Brain Race"

Nerval's Lobster writes "Decades after the space race pitted the United States against Russia, a new race has emerged: the race to map the human brain. The New York Times reported Feb. 18 that the Obama administration is gearing up to announce the Brain Activity Map project, an effort to map an active human brain that could give new insight into how neurons interact with each other, providing new avenues of research for diseases such as Alzheimer's. The U.S. will apparently pit itself against a collection of European research agencies that have announced similar projects. The U.S. effort, however, will apparently involve U.S. businesses, which would naturally benefit from the high-profile nature of the effort; in theory, the latter could also apply the resulting discoveries to their own computing efforts. The Times reported that representatives from Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm met with government representatives at the California Institute of Technology to try and figure out whether or not there are sufficient computing resources to process the vast amounts of data that the experiments are expected to produce, or whether new ones would need to be built."

Comments

Rather stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

It's rather stupid to make or even portray this as a "brain race" between countries akin to the cold war space race. Diseases such as Alzheimer's are a serious problem for every society and research into them should involve high levels of cross-border cooperation not a race, least of all a politically driven one.

Then again, almost every president since JFK has tried to mimic his silly call to put men on the moon by the end of the decade. That egotistical race to do quickly what should have been done well is why we haven't returned to the moon is some forty years. As the economy continues to struggle and Obama's popularity slides ever downward, our politicians will try to distract us with races to this and wars against that.

Note, for instace that the NY Times articles mentions: "The initiative, if successful, could provide a lift for the economy." Not so. Having a president that:

1. Knows something about business, particularly small businesses.

2. Doesn't hate every form of capitalism but politician-enriching crony capitalism.

Is a much better answer to our economic woes than falling for political posturing like this.