14 DAY TRIAL // Green-oriented group PETA has now decided to take a stand against President Obama's BRAIN initiative.
Their reasons for doing so are pretty straightforward: this researcher project cannot possibly yield any noteworthy benefits for humans, simply because most of the experiments are to be carried out on animals.
The BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative is basically a research project worth about $100 million (€76.33 million), whose purpose is that of allowing scientists to gain a better understanding of how the human brain functions.
It is expected that whatever scientific breakthroughs are made while carrying out this research project will eventually translate into the development of new and better treatments for various brain disorders.
What worries PETA is the fact that most of the researchers who have thus far signed up to take part in these investigations are quite keen on experimenting on animals.
Because of this, the organization maintains that their work is unlikely to help humans, seeing how the brains of animals are different from those of people.
“President Barack Obama's new $100 million BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) is intended to provide insight into human brain function and behavior to help find cures for diseases,” reads the organization's official website.
“But considering that the project's leadership committee is dominated by animal experimenters who have little experience in human brain research, it's doubtful that the initiative will be either "advanced" or "innovative" or that it will produce results relevant to humans,” PETA further explains.
The organization now asks that the US National Institutes of Health sort out this issue by making sure that the researchers taking part in President Obama's BRAIN Initiative will only carry out human-based experiments.
PETA also hopes that the general public will agree to contact their senators and representatives and demand that taxpayer funds not be used on irrelevant studies which boil down to tormenting animals without ever succeeding to gain new insights into the human brain.