Every 68 seconds, a senior somewhere in America will develop Alzheimer’s disease. But an ambitious program of research is about to be undertaken to map the human brain, seeking knowledge at a cost of billions of dollars over the next decade.
The Obama administration plans a 10-year scientific exercise to examine how the brain works. The National Institute of Health coincidently has spent $3.8 billion each of the past two years and already budgeted another $3.8 billion for this year for delving into research on brain disorders.
NIH also plans to spend $527 million specifically on Alzheimer’s research this year. Billions more will be spent separately by private and pharmaceutical companies.
The research project the administration is looking toward will involve “teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists to gain understanding” of the brain’s billions of neurons and the roughly 10,000 synapses that branch out from each neuron. The effort also is to find new therapies for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, along with any other brain illnesses.
The project is being called the Brain Activity Map project. It also would attempt to solve such mysteries as how human memory works.
With the current national debt at about $16.7 trillion and the current deficit, according to the CBO at $845 billion, some may believe that, despite its importance, we have no money to spend on such matters as brain research.
Last June, scientists writing in the journal Neuron proposed approaches for mapping the brain.
Obama’s proposal has a similar ring to the Human Genome Project that began in 1984. It eventually mapped the complete human genome – all the genes in human DNA. But mapping the human genome compared to mapping the brain is like comparing kindergarten to postgraduate studies.
Obama maintains that “Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy…Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation,” he said.
Harvard molecular biologist George M. Church, who took part in the Human Genome project, and has been picked to work on the Brain Map said he thinks the brain plan could be even more profitable.
Profitable or not, a cure for Alzheimer’s would be an immeasurable gift to the approximately 5.2 million Americans now with Alzheimer’s. By 2050, almost 14 million seniors could be living (but barely) with the disease.
Nearly 500,000 new cases of the disease will be diagnosed this year, scientists predict. Total payments for health care, long-term care, and hospice for those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are calculated to increase from $200 billion in 2012 to $1.1 trillion in 2050, unless a cure is found.
The NIH funding for HIV/AIDS research is 23 times the amount spent for Alzheimer’s. And cancer research is 12 times as much as is spent for Alzheimer’s research. This, despite the fact that more people die from Alzheimer’s than from the two most common kinds of cancer (breast and prostate) combined.
Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.