It's called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and is one of the biggest scientific projects in history.
Big projects carry unreimbursed costs, as do individual investigator grants awarded by the country's three research granting councils, says Peter MacKinnon, president of the University of Saskatchewan, which is building the Canadian Light Source, the country's biggest scientific project in 30 years.
Seager says she likes to remind people about the value of big, complex scientific projects, even if they cost a lot of money, take a long time to build and don't have a concrete scientific payoff.
"It's probably the biggest ever scientific project in Brazil".
MRT is one of the biggest scientific research projects at the University of Mauritius.
Slated to spend 17% more than its predecessor, the so-called Framework 6 (FP6), which will begin in 2003, would spur more pan-European scientific projects by channeling funds into big-ticket collaborations and paying for more scientists to country hop.
The agreement will enable international collaboration on projects, a necessity in an age when big scientific experiments are too expensive for one country.
The European Commission (EC) is currently funding several projects intended "to explore the potential in Europe to develop a very big scientific initiative in this particular field," says Andrés Moya, head of the Spanish Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology in Valencia.
Of the big scientific programs in the past half-century, few if any were as daunting as the brain project.
A mentor also needs to be able to break the project down into doable pieces and provide the students structure, "because it's a big scientific world".
