The Government Shutdown Has Halted Obama's $100M BRAIN Initiative
Neurons Patrick Hoesly on Flickr Since April, the neuroscience community has been gearing up for the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative (BRAIN), the Obama administration's ambitious plan to map the human brain. Its goal is to "accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.” The BRAIN initiative is being led by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and DARPA. NIH, which pledged $40 million to the initiative, was due to start allocating its BRAIN funding to scientists soon, but now that the government shutdown has furloughed most of its staff, the project, already on a tight schedule, has been put on pause. At...