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Is $100 Million Per Year Too Little For The Brain Map Initiative?
waderoush writes "At a time of sequesters and shrinking R&D spending, critics are attacking President Obama's proposed Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, which would have a $100 million budget starting in 2014. But in fact, the project 'runs the risk of becoming a casualty of small-bore thinking in science business, and politics,' argues Xconomy national life sciences editor Luke Timmerman. The goal of the BRAIN initiative is to develop technologies for exploring the trillions of synapses between neurons in the human brain. If the $3 billion Human Genome Project and its even more productive sequel, the $300-million-per-year Advanced Sequencing Technologies program, are any guide, the initiative could lead to huge advances in our understanding of Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, and consciousness itself. Only government can afford to think this big, argues Timmerman. 'Even though $100 million a year is small change by federal government standards,' Timmerman writes, 'it is enough to create a small market that gives for-profit companies assurance that if they build such tools, someone will buy them. We ought to be talking about how we can free up more money to achieve our neuroscience goals faster, rather than talking about whether we can afford this puny appropriation at all.'"
While I'm all for government research. We need to spend less, not more. BRAIN sounds great, but so does a hundred other potential research projects that aren't even up for funding.
Bah
... more money to achieve our neuroscience goals faster
Apparently they've already achieved augmenting the mind to psychic powers, because there's no other way he knows what my (as, yes, a member of the set of "our") neuroscience goals are.
Since, however, I am not a consulting neuroscientist nor a corporation poised to monetize discoveries in this field, my goals, at least in the "money" terms, probably vary.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Research like this is needed, and could yield benefits in medicine, business, and simply human curiosity about our nature. We *could* just cut programs until we stagnate, or we could invest in science and try to grow. I vote for the latter.
Where does government get its funding from? And who is it that has a serious budgeting problem?
There is already a TON of brain research being funded. This is repackaging existing research as something new. $100 million is nothing compared to the amount already being spent.
Throwing money at a problem only works if you known roughly what you want to do. The Manhattan Project had a well defined goal - 1) separate uranium isotopes or make plutonium, and 2) figure out some way to assemble them fast enough to get a fast chain reaction. They knew up front roughly what was needed. The Apollo program was a step up from the previous rocket programs, but it wasn't the first big rocket.
On the other hand, throwing money at controlled fusion has not been very successful. We don't know how to make that work. Throwing money at artificial intelligence didn't accomplish much until recent years. Interestingly, mobile robotics is now far enough along that throwing money at it works. NASA blew about $80 million on the Flight Telerobotic Servicer in the 1980s and got zip. DARPA has spent over $100 million with Boston Dynamics on BigDog, LS3, PETMAN, and ATLAS, and they're getting results.
The trouble with the BRAIN program is that they're talking about developing bigger computers to emulate a brain, but don't really know what problem they have to solve. This could turn into another supercomputer boondoggle. The comment I've made previously (once to Rod Brooks) about emulating a human brain is that you should try to emulate a mouse brain (1/1000th the mass) first. All the mammal brains have roughly the same architecture. Until you can emulate a mouse brain, you're not ready to try for a human brain. Brooks replied that "he didn't want to go down in history as the person who created the world's best robot mouse." So he tried Cog, which was an embarrassing flop, and hasn't been heard of much since.
While this is a noble project it still should be noted that we can't afford it. $100 million may not be much in the grand scheme of things but as a tax payer I'm outraged that once again we're spending money we don't have. Let's fix the budget, get spending under control and develop a surplus before we embark on any more spending.
I think a better question would be to ask how the money is going to be spent, and the main expenses of the project, before saying x amount of money is too much or too little.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I assume the Human Genome Project was a waste too? And nearly all space travel?
'Even though $100 million a year is small change by federal government standards,'
That much should not be considered a small chunk of change. If a government has gotten so wasteful that an it-is-small-change-compared-to-other-programs argument becomes a valid excuse to fund a $100 million/year project, government spending spending needs to be reevaluated. Yes, sometimes spending money on research is a good thing... hell, I have epilepsy, so I am one of the people that could benefit from this project. But I think there are more important things we need to spending money on.
"Only government can afford to think this big, argues Timmerman" Then let the government get a job that will earn $120,700,000/yr so they can have $100,000,000 after taxes to spend on such a project.
Some years ago I remember reading reports from the research projects which seek to create scanning and interpretation tools which those who are paralyzed, seemingly catatonic (or "vegetables"), and others with severe restrictions in mobility and ability to communicate, can use to communicate with the outside world by manipulating existing computer interfaces and tools. This kind of work was growing magnitudinally and then one day (in any given project) they hit a wall while those used to test the work (who are happy to gain the ability to engage the outside world) mysteriously begin to make the tool do things it is not programmed to do. Apparently, without realizing it they start exploiting bugs to trick the algorithms in use to perform new behaviors, and this means that the researchers attempting to learn more and implement new functions and features have no way of discovering many of the yet-unknowns necessary, which is really bad because the users can't do anything imaginable with bugs, and neither does every user discover the same exploits.
There is no reason to suspect that a project attempting to map a dynamic system as complicated as this will not also hit some seemingly insurmountable walls, as the brain itself perhaps begin exploiting whatever tools are used to probe it: it's an interactive system, after all, which means we need something more like a meta-analysis probe to observe the system in play, rather than ways to interact with it directly. At least, that is, if we're seeking to understand rather than just manipulate it, but even then it manipulates back...We should get more specifics about what projects, exactly, are to be funded; how closely allied they are to this politician and his other cronies vs. how eminent and meritorious they are, and how they intend to deal with problems like the aforementioned, before doling out anything to them.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
In a project, the curve of efficiency divided by money drops off after relatively low budgets. So as long as there are not investments necessary to get to some kind of economies of scale, there is a low likelyhood that more money would have much of an impact.
I am all for this effort, but sometimes there is no way around time.
The US defense budget is 700,000 million. If we reduced the defense budget by .1% (iow, by a factor of .001), we could get another 700 million for this project. If you're concerned about the national security consequences, don't be. We could reduce the defense budget by 50% and still outspend China by more than 2:1.
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It wouldn't surprise me if the areas they will emphasize for study are mind reading, pain infliction (combined with shock supression), memory insertion, and remote control just for the hell of it.
Keep in mind this admin is perfectly comfortable with droning, Gitmo, permanent war...
Yes, Celera was able to do more with less. But that was due to the technology advancing during the 8 years the public project had already been running. Venter was able to use the experience gained from that time.
Also, Venter was using a shotgun approach that hadn't been fully vetted at the time on genomes that large. It turned out it worked well, but for this first time, you still needed the public project data to check it.
This is much like when Eckert and Mauchly were building the Eniac. Partway thru building it, they had learned enough that they would have done it differently. But, you have to get started somewhere and start building to learn. For the genome project, the public project was that start.
This is a little like criticizing someone in the 1920s for using a Model T rather than a modern hybrid like a Prius. The one was part of the development that led to the modern method.
But that was due to the technology advancing during the 8 years the public project had already been running. Venter was able to use the experience gained from that time.
Yes, and as you hinted at, the technology required for Venter's approach didn't even exist when the HGP started. Among other things, they'd have required a couple orders of magnitude more computer hardware to do the genome assembly.
A fair assessment of the HGP is that it was slow to adapt, and stuck to the older, tested methods several years longer than it should have. However, once Celera actually got running, the public genome centers changed relatively quickly and adopted a more efficient industrial approach. Within a couple of years their sequencing capacity increased massively, and basically eliminated the gap with Celera.
Please, cut the hyperbolic bullshit or go live on an island in the Pacific. The government is not keeping you here.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
I know you're a troll, but on the chance that people are thinking the same thing.
Private funding tends to be pretty short sighted. If there isn't an immediately obvious application for it, and a way of making a buck on it, chances are it won't be done. Government money doesn't mean that you can research things of no significance, it just means that you don't have to be able to turn it profitable by itself. And a ton of research out there is useless by itself, but when combined with other studies and research projects makes for some very useful things.
Craig Venter's private company was able to do similar work on the Human Genome Project, in a shorter amount of time, and for roughly 1/10 the cost of Francis Collins' gov't project.
In addition to the fact that Venter was able to take advantage of nearly a decade of technology development, you're leaving out a few important details:
1) Celera was able to use the HGP results, but not vice-versa. Which was convenient, since the HGP's more laborious process could cover parts of the genome that weren't well-suited for the shotgun assembly method.
2) The total cost of the HGP covered much more than simply sequencing the human genome - there were many preliminary and side projects covered as well, none of which Celera pursued.
3) The availability of a public, license-free genome meant that it could be used as a reference for future studies without restriction. This eliminates the need to perform de-novo assembly with each individual genome from the same species, which drastically reduces the cost and time required for further sequencing. Without this, the huge advances in comparative genomics and personal genomics over the past decade would have been hideously expensive, because they'd all have needed to pay Celera for a license (and not been able to publish their results).
Took the words right out of my mouth... but I'll add "and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out". American citzens who whine about the government taking taxes "by force" need to think about what life is like in Cuba or North Korea where the citizens aren't even allowed to leave the country.
Oh, okay. So let's not do any government-funded basic research- it's all heavily speculative anyway. NASA was embarrassingly speculative, why did we do that? Forget about the Human Genome Project.
The government does these projects to absorb the up-front risk that no private enterprise is willing to absorb itself. On government-sized scales, the risk is basically non-existent. If this is not good justification for performing fundamental research, I do not know what sort of organization would be well-justified in performing it.
Manhattan or Apollo projects were successful primarily because they had such a clear focus.
Sequencing the human genome was just a way to push development of techniques: we didn't learn that much from the primary product. especially since it's become clear that expression is far more interesting/relevant than just a straight read of sequences. and even that is arguably incomplete without better proteomics.
neuroscience is not at any clearly defined threshold where we can see what's needed to get to a state of much higher understanding. throwing money at the problem will just exercise our inability to pick winners. (and if there's anything fundamental we know about funding, it's that we, especially governments, simply cannot pick winners. this is why broad funding of basic science is essential: we can't know which directions will pay off.)
sometimes, such big-spending programs are just trying to stretch the normal timeline of a technology. is it actually important to spend $1e8 in order to bring about some technical advance by a year? maybe it's 5 years, maybe it's 6 months. in neuroscience, no one even talks about the unknown unknowns, let alone the known unknowns ;)
This and all other research should be privately funded. This, just like the treadmill for shrimp, is a waste of my and many other people's tax dollars.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbudgetprocess/a/How-Much-Shrimp-Treadmill-Study-Cost-Taxpayers.htm
Government money doesn't mean that you can research things of no significance...
Shrimp treadmill. http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/federalbudgetprocess/a/How-Much-Shrimp-Treadmill-Study-Cost-Taxpayers.htm
Unfortunately, government funded research also is short sighted, but sometimes not as short as that which is commercially funded.
Note that it usually has to be sold to Congress (the actual funders) as having some societal good - witness the brain project being touted as maybe leading to cures for Alzheimers.
Basic research (that is with no obvious commercial potential) usually follows free market principles - there's no market for it so it has to be done for free.
I don't see this changing anytime soon, and maybe it shouldn't...
Americans didn't really lose squat. The bankers multiply money, and had inflated their value from a somewhat sustainable 15x multiplier to somewhere in the 30x range, thanks to the real estate bubble loans and other insurance gimmicks. Then that scheme fell flat, and they lost half their value on paper, bringing down the accounts of investors foolish enough to invest in those "safe" things. But that value never really existed anyway.
The only real crime was giving them real money to prop up their facade. It'll be interesting to see how long we can keep this up.
The geniuses on Wall Street managed to make off with about 80,000x that much five years ago. I'm not seeing most of the banking boards of directors in jail. Every single day they siphon off millions of dollars through HFT and "innovative" financial products at the general public investor's expense.
I suggest you go hunt down bankers if you want some vigilante justice for wasted money.
Not that I endorse this research. It's nice, but as another poster pointed out the EU is already funding somewhat similar research at an order of magnitude larger scale. There are lots of things we (the government) really don't to be spending money on. Thing is, when some of that money ends up in your pocket - or your back yard - it all seems okay. A few years ago I watched a VERY conservative community rail against all the public welfare money, but cheer the USDA grant of $35,000 they took to help put a new roof on their community center, and the $10,000 USDA grant to build a computer lab in the same center. A waste of taxpayer dollars, imho, but in one corner of my mind I thought - well, at least a portion of my money is coming back into my backyard.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Americans who put all their money under their mattress definitely lost out. Americans who invested their money did not. The financial system we have now, while not perfect, is designed to encourage investment rather than just hiding your money and waiting for it to go up in value (like you would do with gold). Having an economy where the investors lose out to the people who can manage to spend the least is a recipe for a depression.
The US government could certainly be more honest about the way it dilutes the USD, and maybe do it in a less manipulative and more stable way, but in the end, it makes a lot of sense to drive growth by encouraging investment. We just maybe need to do it more responsibly.
So what do they want to do?
A massively parallel simulation of a human brain?
Assuming it succeeds, what is the point? We already have 7billion of them around, and much cheaper and we still will not understand how and why it works.
At this point what we need is a few more bright theoreticians and it will not cost nearly as much.
"Does this one have a soul?"
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
they lost half their value on paper, bringing down the accounts of investors foolish enough to invest in those "safe" things.
Maybe you weren't paying attention, but the entire stock market tumbled when the crash came. People who invested in much safer things like mutual funds also lost a huge fraction of their net worth - not quite half, but around 40% in my case. These may not be as conservative an investment as, say, CDs or (on the extreme end) savings accounts, but they're hardly irresponsible speculation.
Now, the good news is that my mutual funds have now climbed back to where they were in late 2007 - this is a big part of the reason why Obama is still president (not that I bothered voting).
Spending public money on brain research (and other basic research) is a really good thing. However, spending money in this way, by taking a huge chunk of money and dedicating it in some limited way, is not a good way of doing it. This money will likely mostly go to just a few big institutions and a lot of it will be wasted. In fact, people haven't even formulated a clear plan on what to do with the money. Money like this should be spent as a large number of small grants, awarded through many different granting agencies. In different words, Obama should have given more money (in fact, a lot more) to NSF, DARPA, and many other granting agencies. But adding another couple of billions to the science budget would just be a budgetary footnote. Taking the same money, calling it an "initiative" for some topic-du-jour, and then giving it to a bunch of marble-clad institutions is a great publicity stunt and PR opportunity for politicians, even though you'll get much less scientific return on the investment. Just as bad is Obama's attempts to justify basic science with supposedly and fictitious vast financial returns. I think the BRAIN project is a cynical abuse of science for the political process, and it will result in less science being done compared to simply increasing regular funding by the same amount.
attempting to prevent the same populist leftist takeover from happening
Anyone who thinks the USA is in any danger of this - in particular, anyone who thinks Obama is representative of such a trend - needs to seek psychiatric help. I happen to live in one of the few places in the country where such far-left agitators (and cult-of-personality followers) group, and they're considered a bunch of nutters by their (overwhelmingly liberal) neighbors. They incite the occasional riot and commit petty vandalism, but their political influence and their ability to cause real damage is nil. The more mainstream leftists content themselves with waving signs whining about the 1% during rush hour; they present absolutely no risk of violent takeover. (Most of them freak out about guns anyway.)
The OWS crowd presents another good example - most people around here like their iPhones too much to want to "smash global capitalism" or whatever the goal is. Supporting nationalized health insurance does not equate to wanting to herd your fellow citizens into forced-labor camps, or summarily execute them. And again, I remind you: the left-wingers in this country are generally not the ones with large numbers of firearms. I think they have a childishly simple and idealistic worldview, and I find them generally incompetent at governing, but they're not the people I'm worried about forming death squads.
A large capital intensive project that yields information that cannot be patented. Why would private investors spend money on it?
The Brain map will discover information, that information cannot be suppressed or even hidden (somebody is bound to leak it for free). Therefore it makes no sense for private investors to pour money into it, since they won't be able to get a return.
On the other hand, the value to society is immense .. therefore government should do it.
Look, we figure out the brain and we figure out how to build one in silica, thereby making it expandable and controllable. At that point, the whole domain of useful, answerable questions is open to us. *This* is the one best thing we could throw R&D money at. I would say, "throw more if it helps" but I don't know that it would.
Anyway, if we don't, the Chinese and Indians will. The country that owns this, owns the world.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
NASA existed so we could prove that we could blow the shit out of Russia from the comfort of home. That was the entire reason we ever went to space at all, just to prove that we could plant a nuke on Moscow from a missile silo in Nebraska, and vice versa.
It was never about "science" or "innovation", it was about military and diplomatic saber rattling.
In case you didn't notice, innovation in the US space program pretty much ended with the cold war. We had obsolete space shuttles with woven core memory operating in the 2000s. It was an extension of a military program, pure and simple.
It's interesting you pick space for this. A couple years ago people like you would probably tell me that no private enterprise would ever invest the massive amount of money necessary for space travel. And yet, in the last few years, private companies have developed technology to get into orbit and it won't be long before they can go further.
It was the realization that NASA was a massive, obsolete, waste of money, combined with the quasi-deregulation of space launches that lead to real innovation for the first time in 30 years, once the government got out of the way.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.