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

Well we now know what Kurzweil is doing @ Google

[Mageek]

n/c

Disease

[leadacid]

Why does research always have to be done to cure diseases? Have we stopped doing research just because it would be nice to know this, because we might be able to do things we haven't dreamed of yet? 'Curing disease' is the reporting version of fighting terrorists and stopping kiddy porn - filler because you can't think of anything real to say. Surely understanding how our brains work is one of the most interesting things we can do, isn't that good enough?

Re:10 million times more data than DNA

[lobiusmoop]

Where do you get 13 billion from? From Human Genome Wikipedia page:

3.3 billion base-pairs recorded at 2 bits per pair would equal 786 megabytes of raw data. This is comparable to a fully data loaded CD.

You seem to be a factor of 2 out.

I bet this race is about patent

[dinther]

No doubt the processes discovered in the brains inner workings will be patented and I will no longer be allowed to think unless I pay a license fee.

Religion?

[Nethead]

Could this become a cure for religion? I mean, if we know exactly how the brain works there is going to be a lot fewer gaps for God to hide in.