Why The Government Should Fund Unpopular Science
Government Spending Imperative Ryan Snook It's a no-brainer: The government should be spending money on science that nobody else wants to fund. In April, President Obama announced, to much fanfare, that the government would spend $100 million on a detailed map of the human brain and how its neurons interact. The project is a waste of money. Brain mapping is well funded by public and private sources, and the feds should instead spend your dough on important things that business won't. The brain map was going to happen anyway. For example, IBM has a computer simulating 530 billion neurons; the Blue Brain Project is modeling the rat brain at the cellular level; the Allen Brain Atlas is mapping how genes in the brain turn on and off. Projects like these already have validity, and some have been funded by the government for years. To a certain extent, Obama's initiative is making...