President Obama pitched a human brain research initiative on Tuesday that he likened to the Human Genome Project to map all the human DNA, and said it will not only help find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and autism, but create jobs and drive economic growth.

Obama proposed $100 million in federal funding to kick start the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies or BRAIN Initiative.

“Imagine if we could reverse traumatic brain injury and PTSD for our wounded veterans coming home,” Obama said at an event unveiling the initiative at the White House.

He said federal investment in basic research had led to completely unexpected inventions, from the Internet to GPS technology. “The Apollo project that put man on the moon gave us, eventually, CAT scans,” Obama said.

He said the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, had paid $140 for every dollar invested.

“As humans we can identify galaxies light-years away, study particles smaller than an atom but we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the 3 pounds of matter than sits between our ears,” Obama said.

"Ideas are what power our economy. It’s what sets us apart. It’s what America has been all about," he added.

"We have been a nation of dreamers and risk-takers; people who see what nobody else sees sooner than anybody else sees it.  We do innovation better than anybody else -- and that makes our economy stronger. When we invest in the best ideas before anybody else does, our businesses and our workers can make the best products and deliver the best services before anybody else."

Obama said he’ll send the proposal to Congress next week as part of his budget request. Although Congress is working to slash the federal deficit, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor signalled an early willingness to pay for this one.

“Mapping the human brain is exactly the type of research we should be funding, by reprioritizing the $250 million we currently spend on political and social science research into expanded medical research, including the expedited mapping of the human brain. It's great science,” Cantor said in a statement.

It's not clear just what the initiative will do. Obama and collins said they'd appointed a "dream team" of experts to lay out the agenda -- they should report back before the end of the summer. They are led by neurobiologists Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University and William Newsome of Stanford University.

Allen Institute for Brain Research

The brain's "emotion center", the amygdala, is highlighted in this 3-D representation of the human brain from the Allen Human Brain Atlas.

“Investing in biomedical research is one of the wisest choices we can make as a nation,” National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins told the gathering. “The United States has been at the forefront of one medical breakthrough after another.”

The public-private initiative, with money from groups such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's brain mapping project, aims to find a way to take pictures of the brain in action in real time.

The $100 million funding will come from the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, the White House said.

“We want to understand the brain to know how we reason, how we memorize, how we learn, how we move, how our emotions work. These abilities define us, yet we hardly understand any of it," said Miyoung Chun, vice president of science programs at The Kavli Foundation, which is taking part in the initiative and which funds basic research in neuroscience and physics.

The project has some big money and some big science to build on. Allen pumped another $300 million into his institute's brain mapping initiative a year ago, and has published freely available maps of the human and mouse brains. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute built a whole research campus devoted to brain science, called Janelia Farm, in Virginia.

Arati Prabhakar, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pointed to a project that allowed a quadriplegic woman to control a robot arm with her thoughts alone.

"There is nothing like a project to inspire people to go to that next level," Collins told a telephone briefing.

Not everybody is happy about a centralized, administration-led project. Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said earlier this year that grand projects in biology such as Project ENCODE for DNA analysis were emerging as the "greatest threat" to individual discovery-driven science.

"It's one thing to fund neuroscience, another to have a centralized 10-year project to 'solve the brain,'" Eisen wrote in a Twitter update in February.

Related:

• How researchers shaped the White House's brain-mapping initiative
• Atlas aims to solve mysteries of the human brain
• Institute unveils mouse brain map

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 2, 2013 6:00 AM EDT

Gerald Herbert / AP

An adult chimp plays with a young chimp at Chimp Haven in Keithville, La., Monday, Feb. 18, 2013. One hundred and eleven chimpanzees will be coming from a south Louisiana laboratory to Chimp Haven, the national sanctuary for chimpanzees retired from federal research.

For the first time in their lives, four aging chimpanzees once used in federal research can go outside whenever they like. They can lie on the grass, clamber onto a platform 20 feet up on a chimp-style jungle gym and gaze freely at the open sky, the vista unbroken by steel bars.

Julius and Sandy, both 52, Phyllis, 46, and 44-year-old Jessica have arrived. They and several other primates are now "living like chimpanzees" as they play, groom each other and tussle at Chimp Haven in northwest Louisiana — the only national sanctuary for retired federal research chimps.

Julius' group is among 111 chimpanzees coming to Chimp Haven over the next 18 months from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's New Iberia Research Center. They could be the vanguard of a much larger immigration of former research chimps on the way to the refuge in Keithville, La.

A National Institutes of Health committee recommended Jan. 22 that most of the other 350 federally owned research chimpanzees be retired to "the federal sanctuary system" — a system of one. The agency's director will decide whether to accept the recommendations after a 60-day period for public comment.

The proposal to retire all but about 50 federally owned chimpanzees is the latest step in a gradual shift away from using chimps as test subjects, owing to technological advances and growing ethical concerns about research on primates that share more than 98 percent of the DNA of humans.

Research on the chimps has ranged from psychological studies to development of vaccines for HIV and hepatitis.

The arrivals are staggered so the small staff can integrate small groups of newcomers with old-timers at Chimp Haven. And some of the living quarters and play spaces haven't yet been built at Chimp Haven, which opened in 2005.

The newcomers led by Julius were among nine that arrived Jan. 22. Another seven arrived later that week and eight more Tuesday.

They got their first view of unobstructed sky last week. New arrivals spend 17 days in quarantine before being moved into an indoor bedroom area near a bedroom occupied by chimps already settled into the sanctuary, to see how they get along.

Their first outdoor time is in one of two grassy, quarter-acre play yards that open onto the bedrooms. A network of steel mesh tunnels lets the staff move chimps from any part of the sanctuary to any other.

Staffers say it's amazing to see them savor new freedoms.

"They light up, look up at the sky, look at us watching them," behaviorist Amy Fultz said.

Like most newcomers to Chimp Haven, Julius' group first explored the edges of its new surroundings. Their play yards are surrounded by a high concrete wall that can't be climbed, and the larger areas of dense pine forest by similar concrete walls and, on one side, a moat.

Chimps in the wild make regular perimeter patrols, alert for any encroaching bands and for a chance to expand their own territory.

These retirees will send the rest of their lives at the 200-acre sanctuary in a forested park belonging to the Caddo Parish government, which donated the land to Chimp Haven. www.chimphaven.org

They get about a month at a time with access to each of the quarter-acre play areas and the habitats of 3 to 5 acres populated by dense stands of pines where the primates can nest high in the trees.

Two other groups of recent arrivals from the university lab in New Iberia are getting acquainted with each other because each includes a youngster. The aim is to meld them and other groups with juveniles into a group with Chimp Haven's three "oops" babies, all sired by Conan, who has been at Chimp Haven for years.

The 111 incoming chimps include a total of eight youngsters; one was born to a female chimp with HIV, but the others and their mothers all are destined to become part of Conan's social group.

On Tuesday, Conan's crowd was in a play area, catching fruit thrown by staffers. A female named Sheila slapped her hands together and then held up an arm to attract attention.

A few minutes' walk away, another group of 15 chimps raced from the steel mesh tunnel between their sleeping area and a 5-acre forested habitat toward an array of fruits and vegetables strewn on the ground. Some grabbed a hoard of bananas, apples and oranges before starting to munch; others ate immediately.

After a bit, several turned to a tall, pointed structure with PVC pipes stuck in it — an imitation termite mound. In the wild, chimps poke sticks into termite mounds to pull out insects to eat. At Chimp Haven, the tubes may hold honey-coated bits of fruit or sugar-free candy, inducing the great apes to use tools as they would in the wild.

Fultz said some newcomers won't even step on the grass in the play yards, but Julius' group had no qualms.

"They sit and look around. They look up at the sky. To me, they seem to be thinking, 'There's no bars,'" Fultz said.

That isn't to say bars don't exist in the sanctuary.

Indoor bedrooms, furnished with straw and blankets for making nests, and old fire hose for climbing, have steel mesh interior walls to keep chimps in.

Chimps with HIV, hepatitis or other major medical or psychological problems have outdoor areas surrounded by the same wide, heavy steel mesh. The peaked ceilings are of pipes laid a few inches apart from each other so the chimps can swing across the ceiling arm over arm, as they might in trees.

"Those spaces are huge. They're huge," said Lori Gruen, a Wesleyan University philosophy professor who specializes in animal ethics and has websites devoted to the issue. Chimp Haven is "a pretty remarkable facility. I think it will be quite interesting and exciting to see it expand." 

But there's a major hurdle. When Chimp Haven was made the national sanctuary in 2002, Congress capped spending on the project at $30 million. That cap will be hit this year. 

U.S. Rep. John Fleming, a Republican representing northwest Louisiana, said in a statement emailed by his press secretary that any additional federal spending "will be difficult" in the current budget climate of mounting federal debt and ongoing national security priorities.

Kathleen Conlee, vice president for animal research issues of the Humane Society of the United States, and other advocates say there's no need for additional spending if Congress would let NIH put money now spent on research contracts into the animals' retirement.

That would save money, because the 75 percent federal share of care at Chimp Haven is lower than the research contracts' cost, Conlee has said.

With help from the Humane Society and other nonprofit groups, the sanctuary has in recent months raised $2.6 million needed to add bedrooms, six play yards and an open-air enclosure to accommodate all 111 federal chimps coming from New Iberia and another $100,000 toward a total $5.1 million goal announced in November.

"We certainly expect and hope the cap will be extended," said Cathy Willis Spraetz, who became president of Chimp Haven three weeks ago.

If it isn't? "Then we have to rely on our wonderful donors," she said.