The Paul Allen brain Atlas, among many other private initiatives, is capable of pursuing this goal better than the federal government, in the same way and for the exact same reasons that Craig Venter & Co. embarrassed the human genome project.
Actually, UC Santa Cruz and the NHGRI/NIH embarrassed Celera by publishing the human genome and setting the whole thing public domain several days before Celera could publish then patent their mappings. And, anyway, the only reason Venter went private was to draw a line in the sand about shotgun sequencing, for which he was having trouble finding public funding/support.
Besides, no one got into space faster than governments, no one has managed to develop cures and vaccines for large-scale and deadly diseases than labs directly funded by the NIH and other governmental agencies, and no one has had the infrastructure to build large-scale networks like the Internet like governments.
I won't even mention interstate/intercontinental highways, sewer systems, healthcare outside of the US, etc. There are simply some things that cannot be done by anyone but the uppercase-P People.
The Paul Allen brain Atlas, among many other private initiatives, is capable of pursuing this goal better than the federal government, in the same way and for the exact same reasons that Craig Venter & Co. embarrassed the human genome project.