The BRAIN Initiative has been around for 9 years and has cost multiple billions of dollars.

The new effort is the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) which will spend $500 million over five years. The goal is to provide a “brain atlas” for use by the scientific community.

While I’m always suspicious of the motives of government programs, this one seems both well-intention and useful. I’m very interested in life extension (I plan to live at least 400 years… I got stuff to do…). This study will go a long way in extending life for us old people.

The research into mapping the genome has lead to a wealth of new treatments for orphan diseases (those for which there were no cures because the there were so few victims that the research wasn’t worth it).

I like this. I’m going to send a donation.

NIH’s BRAIN Initiative puts $500 million into creating most detailed ever human brain atlas – Neuroscientists will build on census of mouse brain as massive program moves into new phase

You can see the current data here.