Obama's BRAIN initiative awards $46 million in grants

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Wearable brain scanners and lasers that can turn hundreds of cells on and off were among 58 projects awarded $46 million in federal grants as part of President Obama's $100 million initiative to unlock the secrets of the human brain.

Launched in 2013, the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is designed to give scientists greater insight into how the healthy brain works and a better understanding of what systems go awry in diseases ranging from Alzheimer's to schizophrenia.

"The human brain is the most complicated biological structure in the known universe. We’ve only just scratched the surface in understanding how it works — or, unfortunately, doesn't quite work when disorders and disease occur," said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the federal agency distributing the $46 million in grants.

He likened the funding to his involvement in the early days of the Human Genome Project, the program that uncovered the precise sequence of 3 billion molecules common to the vast majority of humans' DNA.

I have this picture in my head of Doc Brown in “Back to the Future”, wearing some sort of gizmo on his head that was supposed to allow him to read people’s thoughts, or transmit them, or something. When he realizes what is going on, he exclaims, “Do you know what this means? This damned thing doesn’t work!”

But the flux capacitor worked. Wonder if that was the result of a government grant?

Here are some constitutional problems with Obama's BRAIN Initiative awards.

First, the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to find out how the brain works. So Congress cannot appropriate funds from the taxpayers for this purpose, unless federal lawmakers quit sitting on their hands and successfully petition the states for a constitutional amendment granting them the speciifc power to do so.

Next, the Founding States had made the Constitution's "power of the purse" clause (Article I, Section 7 Clause 1) to uniquely give the House of Representative the power to kill federal spending projects which are unpopular with the voters by stopping funds for that project. This is evidenced by James Madison's The Federalist Papers : No. 58.

The problem now with Congress trying to use the purse clause to stop funding for programs like the BRAIN Initiative is the following. Obama's first Democratic-controlled Congress foolishly defeated the Founders' purpose for that clause by unthinkingly passing two constitutionally indefensible federal spending programs, the Stimulus Program and ~~Obamacare~~ Democratcare. By passing these programs, corrupt Congress essentially gave Obama a blank check to fund constitutionally indefensible federal programs like the BRAIN Initiative, the purse clause now useless to stop federal spending which is either unpopular or unconstitutional.

http://bioethics.gov/sites/default/files/news/Charge%20from%20President%20Obama.pdf

From Bloomberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-14/ethical-standards-for-brain-research-set-by-obama-s-commission

“The panel’s report notes, for instance, that scientists are already investigating the use of neuroimaging as a possible tool in determining criminal intent or the tendency to lie. Subjects, the report said, need to have an assurance of privacy in order to advance scientific research into disease. “

This is the same person who now advocates changing the beliefs of those who are deeply religious to meet the new standards of defining criminal thinking.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3305911/posts

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