>> Dr. Francis Collins: When I became director of the NIH five years ago I knew it would
be an exciting ride, I knew there would be advances happening in many different areas
of this wonderful landscape that I have the chance to watch over as NIH director that
represents biomedical research. I frankly did not know that we would be at this point
of announcing today the first launch of a most impressive series of projects aiming
at understanding how the circuits of the human brain work. We are seriously tackling an understanding
of the most complicated biological structure in the known universe. Because we are announcing
today this first wave of NIH investments in support of the project called BRAIN, which
of course is an acronym- we are the government. BRAIN stands for brain research through advancing
innovative neurotechnologies. Stephen Colbert made fun of it. He says you�re not supposed
to have the word �brain� in the explanation of your acronym- BRAIN- but we�re sticking
with it because we think it says what this about. And notice the title, advancing innovative
neurotechnologies, most of what you will see in this remarkable awards set today of these
grant awards- 58 of them- are technological advances�the development of really exciting
new tools to be able to understand how these circuits work. These awards will support more
than 100 investigators who are going to develop transformative technologies that will accelerate
fundamental understanding of the brain�and I think you will see that they are technologically
really quite challenging and inspiring and they are across many different areas and many
different organisms with some of them focuses on model organisms and some on the human brain
itself. They focus on classifying on the myriad of cell types in the brain�we need to know
those� producing tools and techniques for analyzing brain cells and circuits, creating
next generation human brain imaging technology, developing methods for large scale recordings
of brain activity and integrating experiments with theories and models to understand the
functions of specific brain circuits. These are all pretty challenging but among them
are the development, for instance, of a wearable PET scanner for measuring brain activity during
daily activities. The investigator says he would like to have a PET scanner that could
access what�s happening in the brain during the proverbial walk in the park. And of course,
these days, we are getting increasingly good at measuring brain activity but usually with
people who are lying quite still in the midst of a major piece of equipment. The idea of
making this ambulatory� and there�s a similar kind of approach being proposed for
MRI. Another one uses lasers to noninvasively turn hundreds of specific cells on or off
anywhere in the brain. Another is developing next generation microelectrodes that can not
only measure but deliver small doses of drugs and record activity from thousands of individual
neurons for months at a time. And there�s also an exciting one which allows real time
movements of neurotransmitters to be observed � neurotransmitters involved in disorders
like Alzheimer�s, Parkinson�s, schizophrenia and depression. So, I think its fair to say
since the President�s announcement a little over a year and a half ago NIH has made tremendous
strides to take what is an audacious initiative and put a vision and a framework to help us
achieve that. At NIH we agree that four and a half billion dollars is a realistic estimate
of what will be required for this kind of a moonshot. And while that�s a large investment
still keep that in context that even at its proposed peak the BRAIN Initiative each year
would still only comprise approximately ten percent of what NIH is investing in neuroscience
which is about which is about five and a half billion dollars each year. But make no mistake,
it�s certainly important to maintain that broader neuroscience investment. The BRAIN
Initiative must be an enabler and not a competitor for neuroscience funding at NIH. But it will
be worth it. Some of the projects here have the ability to transform how we study the
brain and new technologies and industries will likely be spawned. Possibly most importantly,
the new insight we will ultimately gain from utilizing these new tools and technologies
will enable researchers to develop new treatments and even cures discovered for devastating
disorders and diseases of the brain and nervous system. While the BRAIN Initiative is a basic
science effort to build a foundation of understanding in how the brain works, every disease research
that we support will build upon this to try to understand and apply that understanding
to better diagnosis and treatment. Just one example I mentioned a minute ago about the
ability to track real time movements of neurotransmitters involved in disease disorders can certainly
point to that pathway. So this is certainly a bold science initiative. These initial awards
mark the first step in ambitious journey. So, we are taking on, with this launch, an
amazing journey. We have called this a moonshot. For me as somebody who had the privilege of
leading the human genome project this sort of has the same feel as October 1990 when
the first genome centers were announced. We knew at that point we were going down a road
that was going to be uncertain and needed a lot of technology developments and ultimately
it turned out really well. I�m confident this one will as well even though none of
us can quite predict the twists and turns in this exciting area of scientific research.