Researchers Say They've Digitized Part of Brain...
Researchers Say They’ve Recreated Part of a Rat Brain
Digitally
By JAMES GORMAN OCT. 8, 2015
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 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.
A version of this article appears in print on October 9,
2015, on page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: Part of Rat Brain
Is Recreated in a Computer, Researchers Say.
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