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Is This The 'Golden Age' Of Brain Science?

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A researcher holds a human brain in a laboratory at Northwestern University's cognitive neurology and Alzheimer's disease center in Chicago. (Scott Eisen/AP)
A researcher holds a human brain in a laboratory at Northwestern University's cognitive neurology and Alzheimer's disease center in Chicago. (Scott Eisen/AP)

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy set the nation's sights on the moon. A half-century later, President Barack Obama announced that neuroscience would be his signature scientific effort and committed $100 million to a project called the "BRAIN Initiative." Its goal is to research and develop more advanced tools to better understand how the human brain works.

That ambitious effort is the focus of a new weekly WBUR series launched Thursday called "Brain Matters: Reporting from the Front Lines of Neuroscience."

Guests

Carey Goldberg, WBUR health/science reporter and co-host of WBUR's CommonHealth blog. She tweets at @commonhealth.

Dr. Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

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CommonHealth: Unlocking The Brain: Are We Entering A Golden Age Of Neuroscience?

  • "That’s the monumental gamble of Obama’s BRAIN initiative — and other major neuroscience efforts now getting under way around the world. They’re not trying to solve philosophical questions. They’re responding to the growing realization that brain disorders — from autism to mental illness to dementia — are a worldwide scourge, affecting at least a billion people."

This segment aired on June 12, 2014.

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