Read Online Game Changer by Douglas E. Richards - Free Book Online

something he posted in 2014, when the BRAIN
initiative was first announced.”
    She looked down at the screen
and began to read:
      Some
have called it America’s next moonshot. Indeed, like the historic effort that
culminated with the first moon landing in 1969, the Brain Research through
Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is a bold,
ambitious endeavor that will require the energy of thousands of our nation’s
most creative minds working together over the long haul.
    Our goal? To produce the first dynamic
view of the human brain in action, revealing how its roughly eighty-six billion
neurons and its trillions of connections interact in real time. This new view
will revolutionize our understanding of how we think, feel, learn, remember,
and move, transforming efforts to help the more than one billion people
worldwide who suffer from autism, depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy,
traumatic brain injury, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and other
devastating brain disorders.
    When on May 25, 1961, President
Kennedy announced plans to go to the moon by the end of the decade, most
Americans (not to mention space scientists!) were stunned because much of the
technology needed to achieve a moonshot didn’t yet exist. Likewise, medical
research today faces a wide gap between our current technologies for studying
the brain and what will be needed to realize BRAIN’s ambitious goals.
    Rachel stopped reading and faced
her class once again. “There’s more, but I won’t go on. I just wanted to give
you a flavor of where things were a decade or so ago, when many of you were in
high school or even middle school. Collins goes on to detail this technology
gap. But, as all of you know, ninety percent of the first draft of the brain is
already done. And, as usual, it is way ahead of schedule, and has defied every
expectation. When it is fully completed, and then modeled in our best
computers, the power this will give us to understand the innermost workings of
the human brain will be unprecedented .
We will have a unique ability to explore ourselves, learn what makes us tick.
Even with an incomplete, raw version, recent breakthroughs being made have been
extraordinary. As this data grows hand in hand with advances in biotech and
computer science, there is very little we won’t soon be able to achieve.”
    Rachel Howard had been at the
forefront of the field for some time, and the passion and certainty with which
she delivered these words was electrifying.  
    After a long pause, giving her
inspirational words time to marinate, she continued. “So let’s go. Let’s begin
a big-picture discussion of such things as finding the cure for Alzheimer’s. A
huge and tragic disease affecting more and more of us as we extend the
lifespan, and as the percentage of us who are elderly continues to increase.
Let’s explore findings with respect to the brain and spirituality, begging a
discussion of how religion, evolution, and neurochemistry might fit together.
Let’s take a panoramic look at addiction research; pros, cons, issues, and
ethics. And we’ll want to save a good thirty minutes to discuss one of my favorite
topics: research into the human sex drive, which colors every aspect of our
behavior, actions, and civilization. I defy you to watch TV for ten minutes without
at least one sexual reference coming up, without seeing sex being used to sell
beer or hamburgers.”
    Rachel raised her eyebrows. “And
for good reason,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Because a strong urge to
mate, to reproduce, is an absolute requirement for genes to be passed on. We
can be sure of only one thing: every one of our ancestors managed to find a
partner and mate, whatever that took. If not, we wouldn’t be here to talk about
it.
    “And we’ll even ask the following
question,” she continued, “which is stronger, the survival instinct or the sex
drive? Not as obvious as it might seem at first blush. Just ask