The first “Big Science” projects came from physics and astronomy – think the atomic bomb, CERN or the Hubble telescope. No longer; now it is the turn of the biomedical sciences. Although the 1990s was supposed to be the decade of the brain and the 2000s that of the mind, brain science has hitherto lacked a big project and certainly a big budget.
Now, suddenly, it has two. Last year the EU announced that one of the winners in its €1billion “Grand Challenges” competition was the Human Brain Project (HBP) – which recently received a funding boost thanks to a 40% increase in the number of partners in the HBP consortium. Also launched last year, with much fanfare, was President Obama’s $3billion “Brain Action Map” (BAM). Obama cited the Battelle Institute’s claim that every dollar spent on the Human Genome Project (HGP) had yielded $140 to the US economy, though as yet only the first $100 million has been committed to the project.
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