$4.5 Billion Braindoggle Initiative

"Now, after more than a year of meetings and deliberations, an NIH-convened working group has fleshed out some the goals and aspirations of BRAIN and tried to offer a more realistic appraisal of the funding needed: $4.5 billion over the course of a decade, or roughly quadruple the project’s currently planned budget."A mere bagatelle... Although, one wonders what one would expect to hear from a panel largely composed of neuroscientists on the subject of how much public lucre should get funneled into... erm... neuroscience."Neuroscientist Cornelia Bargmann, of Rockefeller University in New York City, who led the working group, sought to put that cost in perspective at a press conference today, saying it amounted to “about one six-pack of beer for each American over the entire 12 years of the program.”Well, when you put it like that, I mean, it's nuffin, right! Only, the same can be said for just about everything that is government funded, and it's the cumulative weight of all those mere six-packs that starts to impact the wallet of Joe... erm... Six-pack. Which is why it 's disingenuous to frame public expenses in such a manner. $500 million a year on a single field within the health sciences is not chump change.Former director of the NIGMS, Jeremy Berg, tweeted"Understanding is a very important goal, but investigator-initiated research can often meet this goal better than top-down"Do we have solid evidence that his sort of top-down approach is be...
Source: Across the Bilayer - Category: Medical Scientists Source Type: blogs