![]() "Every month and year we delay in getting this going are going to have consequences." The setbacks will, of course, also delay the discoveries of potential therapies that could come out of the research initiative - which aims to map the brain as a means to develop new technologies that could help fight diseases such as Alzheimer's and epilepsy. "Those understandings of brain function are critical to understanding what goes wrong in neurological and psychiatric disorders," Newsome said. That money is supposed to hire scientists to begin working on understanding normal brain functions, he said. But now, due to the government's failure to pass a federal budget, BRAIN has been indefinitely placed on hold, putting the effort's start and its progress as a decade-long process at serious risk.īill Newsome, one of BRAIN's co-chairs and a Stanford University professor, told Popular Science that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was set to spend the first $40 million of the project's budget. The BRAIN project is already an ambitious one running on a tight schedule - $100 million is to be set spent in 2014 to start the daunting task of trying to map the human brain. Now the start of the Obama Administration's Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, which was set to officially begin early next year, is in jeopardy too. The US government's shutdown has put about 800,000 people out of work, and caused stoppages at NASA, the Department of Health and Human services, the CIA and NSA, and nearly every other federal agency.
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