$4.5 billion. That’s how much Barack Obama’s BRAIN costs.

The BRAIN Initiative, much championed by the US president, aims to map all of the human brain’s activity. The project was initially given a $1 billion budget to be spent over 12 years, but the National Institutes of Health, which is leading the project, has now requested this be more than quadrupled.

Much like the $3 billion Human Genome Project, “some things are best done in a ‘big science’ kind of way”, says Richard Born of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, whose lab may qualify for funding under the initiative.

There has been a tremendous influx of new tools in neuroscience, but they need to be better integrated and better developed to make them more useful in human applications, says Born. He hopes that a project of this scale will lead to a more unified effort.


Allan Jones, CEO of the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences in Seattle, Washington, says: “I applaud [the NIH] for thinking big and bold; this is a unique moment in history, with a US president calling out brain science as a priority.”

If the funding is granted, it will dwarf Europe’s big neuroscience project, the Human Brain Project – an attempt to recreate a human brain in a supercomputer, at a cost of $1.6 billion over 10 years.

Representatives of both projects are due to meet to discuss shared interests and develop useful connections. However, Born thinks the US project will be money better spent. “I don’t think the money that Europe put into the efforts was particularly wisely spent” he says. “The NIH has very wise leaders, so if the US continues to manage its money wisely, we’ll see much greater results.”