Feb 2013
Brain Project Draws Presidential Interest
20/02/13 16:14 Filed in: sciencemag.com
The New York Times reported that the Obama administration will in its next budget proposal seek to launch a potentially multi-billion dollar major research initiative, known as the Brain Activity Map (BAM) project to greatly expand understanding of the healthy and diseased human brain. S. Pelech cynically looks ahead to what proponents of the BAM project will say 10 years later about the success of the project. He notes that detailed mapping neuronal connections in the brain in the end will not really be that useful for rectifying the pathological processes that underlie the most common brain and spinal cord diseases, where it is the destruction of neurons and other supporting brain cells that actually leads to loss of brain function. Read More...
Billion-Dollar Brain Map
18/02/13 16:10 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration is set to announce a large-scale, decade-long project to map the activity of the human brain. Proponents such as George Church at Harvard University have argued that the Brain Activity Map could provide a much-needed financial boost for neuroscience in the order of $300 million a year. S. Pelech seriously questions the wisdom of diverting a significant amount of the limited resources available at this juncture for basic scientific research towards the specific goal of mapping brain activity patterns at the cellular level in high resolution. He notes a huge litany of issues ranging from technical, economic, and practical to profound ethical considerations associated with such a proposal. Read More...
A Good Return
14/02/13 16:08 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
In his recent State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama made mention of how for every dollar the US government invested to map the human genome, $140 was returned to the US economy. This was based on a 2011 report by the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice, which calculated the direct, indirect, and induced impacts of human genome sequencing on employment, personal income, output, and tax revenue. S. Pelech challenges the accuracy of these estimates and pointed out that private industry and non-HGP government- and charity-funded investigator-driven projects really made the major in-roads in the identification and characterization of most of the human genes that have been targeted by the pharmaceutical and biotech industry to date. He also takes issue with the claims of the actual direct economic and scientific benefits of the Human Genome Project. Read More...