Last summer, six scientists proposed a project they compared in scope and ambition to the Human Genome Project: to map the activity of the human brain. In February, news media reported that the Obama administration plans to move forward with that effort, known as the Brain Activity Map.

One of those six scientists was George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Church, who is also a founding investigator of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and Personal Genome Project (PGP), sat down with Harvard Medicine News to discuss the roots, ambitions and challenges of the Brain Activity Map (BAM).