The Big Sell

In his State of the Union address in February, President Obama made a nod to an emerging federal science project with an incredibly lofty goal: to understand how the brain works.Obama’s oblique mention, delivered before the project was announced—“Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s”—spurred a suggestive tweet from the leader of the National Institutes of Health and a barrage of questions and speculations from the scientific community.Big budgets ($300 million a year for 10 years) and big goals (measuring every spike from every neuron in the brain) were thrown out in the press. As the New York Timesdescribed it a few days after the State of the Union, the project was “seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.”That goal, however appealing, is not going to happen. It probably never had a chance of happening. And that’s not such a bad thing.Read more at...Slate, October 2013.