Obama Goes Public With Brain-Mapping Plan

President Obama officially announced a new brain research initiative in a press conference at the White House this morning, something he first hinted at in his State of the Union address in February. In its first year, the project would devote roughly $100 million in public funding and a similar amount from private foundations, to develop new tools for mapping neural circuits. "The human brain is at the present time the most complicated organ in the known universe," Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told reporters on a conference call this morning. Understanding how circuits of neurons contribute to the complex properties of the brain and how they break down in disease is one of the biggest scientific challenges of our time, Collins said. "We aim through this very ambitious project, some might even call it audacious, to begin to unravel those mysteries."