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Blue Brain Project: modelling the human brain in the lab
- Science has advanced in the Second Millennium in ways that we now challenge ourselves into doing what we could not have earlier.
- We have sent man-made crafts to other planets, and have made machines and tools that enquire whether life exists elsewhere in the sky, and whether there are other planets similar to ours that may supports life- “second earths”.
- We have read the “book of human life”, the 3.2 billion- letter-long code of DNA that makes us what we are.
- What about the brain? Can we ‘model' the human brain in the laboratory?
- There are two ways to approach this grand challenge.
- One is to try and understand the neurons (nerve cells) of “lower” organisms – worms, flies, fish, rats and such, and build on this knowledge. This involves experiments on the “normal” organism and on its “mutants” – its cousins who are born (or tampered with in the lab) with one or more neural problem. This field is busy; every year as many as 60,000 papers are published in this area of neuroscience. But we need to learn from them, bring the pieces together and make sense out of them. This approach is incremental, building from what we have learnt and plan new experiments there from.
- With advent of computers, another approach called in silico (since computers use silica chips) has emerged. This exploits the fact that information is collected and collated in the brain via connections between neurons; based on the results of such neural interactions, the brain processes the information and acts on it.
- By the 1990s, IBM had put together a then gigantic computer system that was named ‘Blue Gene' (blue being the nickname for IBM, and gene referring to the kind of biologically realistic model of DNA-based and protein- based information processing). One of the noteworthy programming done using the capabilities of Blue Gene was to play chess.
- It is these advances in computers that led to think of creating supercomputer models of the brain that would be accurate to the last biological details and resulted in the Blue Brain Project (the blue here symbolizing supercomputers).
- It uses the information available from the hundreds of thousands of publications of neuroscientists on one hand, and ability of computer programmers to create connectivities between the millions of “neurons” in silico on the other. Combining the two, he expects to build a facility that would aim at data integration and help build brain models.
- And by 2006, they were able to simulate one of the neocortical columns of the brain of a rat.
- The neocortex is that part of the brain responsible for higher functions such as thought and consciousness.
- The neocortex of the rate consists of many columns, which are interconnected through synapses (connecting junctions or ‘solders').
- And given enough money, it should be possible in about 10 years hence, to get the first to the first draft of a unified model of the human brain. It will not be a complete model, but one that will account for what we know.
