Arguably more ambitious than the Human Genome Project or the Apollo program, the Brain Research Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative endeavors to demystify our least understood organ—and the one that makes us most human. Announced by President Obama in 2013, the 12-year, $4.5-billion undertaking aims to establish links between brain function and behavior, and to develop tools that will help us finally get to the bottom of conditions such as Alzheimer's, autism, and depression. As the project's planning co-chair, Rockefeller University neurobiologist Cori Bargmann spent the past year assembling expert teams and vetting research ideas. Now, she says, the real work begins. In her own words:

I don't expect science to be at the very top of the political agenda. But a whole lot of scientists—and the president himself—said this is the time to figure out the brain. We began by organizing workshops with thousands of researchers in different fields, asking questions about brain chemistry, imaging, and tools: What do we have? What's on the horizon? What do we really need?

In the past century of neuroscience, there's been a lot of analysis of individual neurons and synapses, and, more recently, imaging of the whole brain. But we scientists think everything of substance happens in between these two scales. It's as if you're studying New York City with a microscope and satellite images. But what you really want is to look at it on a human scale.