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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.'"
There are many potential projects, so we should spend LESS?
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.
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.
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
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The government should be a major source of funding for research, the government doesn't have to worry about being profitable in any given quarter, so long as the research leads to prosperity that's all well and good.
As the AC asked, the solution to many potential projects is less funding? In what way does that make any sense at all?
What's more you wouldn't be typing that without US government money for things like the internet and laptops would probably not exist either as battery research was primarily driven by space exploration related needs.
When all is said and done this sort of "thinking" is what's threatening the US, get the government out of it and hope your cause is sufficiently sexy to attract philanthropists.
Yes, sometimes more, sometimes less, that's how prioritization works.
Although learning more about how the brain works is a worthy goal, it is not necessarily the *most* worthy goal, and it may actually be better to have the government spend less on it (so more can be spent on other things).
If we solved all the other problems in the world except demystifying the brain (even if it wasn't that important), then we should absolutely spend all our research money on that. This is an example of having less potential projects causing the best option to be to spend more on brain research.
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.