On Tuesday, President Obama announced in the East Room of the White House that he would propose investments in what he's calling the BRAIN initiative, "giving scientists the tools they need to get a dynamic picture of the brain in action and better understand how we think and how we learn and how we remember. And that knowledge could be — will be — transformative." Such a project could also "explain all kinds of things that go on in Washington," he cracked. "Maybe we could prescribe something."
In making the case for the BRAIN initiative–"BRAIN" is an acronym for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies–Obama said, "Every dollar we spent to map the human genome has returned $140 to our economy — $1 of investment, $140 in return."
Is that number correct?
The BRAIN initiative has generated some controversy. A month ago, Meredith Wadman wrote at Nature that some scientists worry that this "big science" project will "crowd out projects pitched by individual scientists." Cori Bargmann, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, told Wadman that "creative science is bottom-up, not top-down. Are we talking about central planning inside the Beltway?”
It's the "kind of science–big and bold–that politicians like," Wadman wrote. “What motivates people to pursue these big projects is not the belief that they will solve problems,” Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told her. “It’s the belief that this is the way to get money.” At ScienceInsider, Emily Underwood quoted Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, a former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "As the proposal stands, it's still awfully vague, so it's hard not to have some reservations," he told her.
To anyone who covered the initial discussions that led to the human genome project, these arguments will sound familiar. "Critics argue that the human genome project has been sold on hype and glitter, rather than its scientific merits, and that it will drain talent, money and life from smaller, worthier biomedical efforts," wrote Natalie Angier in The New York Times on June 5, 1990. "The human genome project is bad science, it's unthought-out science, it's hyped science,'' Dr. Martin Rechsteiner, a biochemist at the University of Utah, told Angier.
It's unlikely anyone would say that now. But did the genome project actually return $140 for every dollar invested? "Certainly, the president’s broader point is correct—federal government investment in research is often an important factor in innovations and scientific achievements that have enhanced Americans’ lives," wrote fact-checker Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post. "But 140 times return on investment? That sounded a bit too good to be true."
Kessler traces the figure to a May 2011 assessment by the Batelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, which made a lot of assumptions that could reasonably be questioned. It concluded that an investment of $5.6 billion in 2010 dollars generated $796 billion in economic output. One of the authors of the study explained to Kessler that the invesment "helped to generate that economic activity, not that the economic activity was a direct result from the government spending." Still, Kessler concedes, as virtually everyone does, that the human genome project generated what he calls "a substantial return."
The lesson? Check the numbers–especially those that appear to be too good–or too precise–to be true.
And perhaps there is a lesson for the PR operatives who released the news on this. The New York Times apparently scooped the competition twice on this, once on Feb. 17th and again just before Obama's Tuesday announcement. If the Times got these jumps through hard work, congrats. If the administration released them to the Times first–that's not fair.
-Paul Raeburn
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