http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/science/rat-brain-digital-reconstruction-human-brain-project.html
Building
on years of research, 82 researchers from institutions around the world
reported Thursday that they had built a reconstruction of a section of a
rat brain in a computer.
The research was partly supported by the Human Brain Project, a more than $1 billion, 10-year European research program. The report comes directly from the Blue Brain Project, which aims to reconstruct the rat brain and eventually the human brain in a computer.
Both research programs have been controversial. Hundreds of neuroscientists signed an open letter in 2014(naysayers here) criticizing both the overall project and the feasibility of the reconstruction goal.
Henry Markram,
of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who leads both
projects, said that what he and his many colleagues had achieved was the
first draft of a functioning map of 30,000 brain cells.
He
said this was not yet a proof of principle that scientists could indeed
reconstruct the human brain, which contains 85 billion or more neurons,
but that it was a first step.
Cori Bargmann,
co-director of the new Kavli Neural Systems Institute at Rockefeller
University, who has been intimately involved with the Brain Initiative,
also a long-term research program, said the report represented an
“amazing tour de force” in its accumulation of data.
But,
she said, the “simulations are in their infancy,” and therefore what
this means for the larger goals of reconstructing a whole brain is
unclear. “They built a 747, and it’s taxiing around the runway,” she
said. “I haven’t seen it fly yet, but it’s promising.”
The
reconstruction that Dr. Markram envisions is a research tool that would
digitally encode some characteristics of neurons and their connections
that are common to all brains. It is not the futuristic dream of
uploading a human personality to a computer.
To
build a digital version of the portion of rat brain, researchers did
not record the details of every single cell. They used the data from
some cells to inform what the whole would look like. Then they simulated
certain kinds of brain activity and found that the reconstruction acted
like the living tissue. All the data for the reconstruction will be
available for other scientists.
The report, published in Cell,
a scientific journal, is one of the longest neuroscience reports ever,
and several neuroscientists declined to comment before publication
because of the time required to evaluate it fully.
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