The US BRAIN Initiative and the European Commission's Human Brain Project might be more usefully compared to former US President Richard Nixon's 'War on Cancer' than to the Human Genome Project (Nature 499, 253; 2013 and Nature 499, 272–274; 2013).

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent after Nixon's 1971 National Cancer Act, the 'war' is still far from over. Back then, cancer scientist Sol Spiegelman remarked: “An all-out effort at this time would be like trying to land a man on the Moon without knowing Newton's laws of gravity.”

The same might be said of these huge brain-mapping ventures: we have not yet cracked the neural code, and we have only the most rudimentary understanding of the signature nonlinear dynamics of brain function.

A sound understanding of underlying scientific principles was essential to successful mega-projects such as the Moon landing and the Manhattan Project. Without this, brain-mapping efforts may be premature — the equivalent of mapping the structure of snowflakes, while diverting efforts away from understanding the scientific principles that generate them.

The Human Genome Project was of immense benefit to science, but in and of itself it was a feat of engineering. It is unlikely that the project will provide an appropriate blueprint for perhaps the biggest mystery the human brain has ever pondered.