BBC Words in the News 13/04 with transcript video

The president’s advisors call the BRAIN project ambitious, even audacious. It aims to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show, in the words of a White House statement, how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought. Announcing the programme, Barack Obama said humans could identify distant galaxies and study subatomic particles, but still had a limited understanding of the brain.

Barack Obama:

“There’s this enormous mystery waiting to be unlocked. The BRAIN Initiative will change that by 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.”

That knowledge, he said, would be transformative: families no longer helpless at the onset of Parkinson’s, and war veterans able to reverse the effects of traumatic brain injury. The administration reckons it costs around $500bn a year to treat the various conditions this project hopes to address. It believes that technological advances, in data processing and revolutionary new techniques like optogenetics mean that, for the first time, this hugely ambitious research is actually possible.

No matter how baffling it may seem to outsiders, the allure of a dead socialist leader can’t be underestimated. In Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi, the corpses of Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh are displayed under subdued lighting for equally subdued lines of people to file past, paying silent respects.

In North Korea, Kim Il-sung’s public resting place was recently renovated to accommodate the embalmed remains of his son Kim Jong-il.

In Beijing, visitors to Mao Zedong are encouraged to buy flowers for him, though they must leave them outside.

Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s revolutionary leader, wanted to be cremated but was preserved nonetheless. Outside his mausoleum Vietnamese queue in their hundreds for entry: schoolchildren, grizzled old men; women dressed in traditional ao dai.

The pull of the embalming fluid becomes still more puzzling when a country has politically moved on. Lenin has so far survived several attempts to evict him from Red Square, though the Soviet Union is long gone.

In China, Mao lingers at the heart of a capital which also plays host nowadays to Starbucks and McDonald’s. But so far, China’s politicians can still quote the sayings of Mao while pursuing policies widely at variance with his legacy.

It’s a balancing act that critics of the embalming of Venezuela’s president will now be anxiously watching.

We now have a first-hand account of what compelled Bradley Manning to carry out the biggest leak of government secrets in American history.

He told the military court he’d been appalled by the “bloodlust” of a helicopter mission in Iraq – video of which he passed on to Wikileaks. He said that while serving in Iraq, he’d become depressed at what he called America’s “obsession” with capturing and killing human targets. And that the American people should know the “true costs of war”.

As for the leaked State Department cables, Private Manning said they “documented backdoor deals and criminality” unbecoming of a superpower, and insisted his conscience was clear.

The military judge accepted the defendant’s plea of guilty to 10 of the 22 counts. But Bradley Manning denies the most serious charge of aiding America’s enemies – a charge which potentially carries a life sentence. Prosecutors have indicated that they plan to push ahead with a full court martial in the summer.