A former Weizmann Institute scientist seeks to create an electronic human brain with cognitive abilities to provide insight into the most powerful ‘computer’ in existence.

We already have mechanical and computerized devices that can stand in for human limbs and organs. Now Prof. Henry Markram is working on a computerized version of the human brain, down to its finest synapses. In fact, Markram, who did much of his research at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, tells ISRAEL21c that if his Blue Brain Project goes well, “we anticipate that the brain model we develop will have most, if not all, human cognitive capabilities.”

Markram is currently director of the Brain and Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is there where the Blue Brain Project was founded in May 2005, to study the brain’s “architectural and functional principles.”

Working with a number of international researchers, including Prof. Idan Segev of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the project aims to “reverse engineer” the workings of the brain – beginning with the brains of small mammals, said Markram, and culminating in the human brain, a goal that he hopes to achieve by the close of the decade.

Scientists have long known that the brain functions like a mass of small computers, with neurons gathering and transmitting electrochemical signals concerning muscle actions, thoughts, reactions, etc.

The 100 billion or so neurons in the human brain behave like a supercomputer, controlling the overall structure of the body. Upon realizing this, Markram said, he began to analyze and map the structure and relationships among neurons (neocortical microcircuitry), the better to understand how things can go askew in the mind.

“I realized already in the early 1990s that if we ever want to understand the brain and its diseases, we will need to develop a functional computer model of a working brain,” said Markram. Once built, the computer model – which should be able to almost exactly mimic the activity of a human brain – could be used for basic brain research, for analysis and treatment of brain diseases, and development of new pharmaceutical treatments for brain diseases.

Much of the basic research for Blue Brain was carried out at the Weizmann Institute, Markram tells ISRAEL21c. “I carried out almost all the biological studies on the neocortical microcircuitry at Weizmann when I worked there between 1995 and 2002. This data represents the most comprehensive set of any neural circuit in the world, and provided the blueprints to build the first prototype model of a rat’s neocortical column [a project completed in December 2006] ,” he said

Markram joined the Weizmann Institute after coming on aliya from South Africa in 1988 and serving in the IDF in 1990. “I came on a Karyn Kupcinet Fellowship program from South Africa. I was so excited by what Weizmann had to offer that I stopped my studies in South Africa and moved to Israel,” says Markram, who met his first wife in Israel, where they had three children.

It was his early research at Weizmann that convinced Markram that it was possible to build a model of the human brain: “Science is becoming industrialized, allowing one to screen the brain at all levels at a much faster rate than was ever before possible. For example, we can generate more data in a few months today than in the entire 20th century. So it will become much easier to reverse engineer the composition and function of the elements of the brain.”

As computing power increases, scientists have more access to supercomputers that until now were available only to government and the military. As they harness that power, real-life simulations of the most complicated structures – like that of the human brain – are only a few years away.

Markram expects that “by 2018 supercomputers will have reached the power needed to accomplish our goal.” And the need is urgent: “Brain diseases cost economies and societies a great deal, so now that we have the ability, we need to do this research as soon as possible,” he asserts.

As with many other breakthrough projects in the life-sciences area, Markram’s Blue Brain project has attracted its share of criticism - on both religious/ethical grounds, as well as from other scientists. Markram isn’t too concerned about the former. “I don’t think it goes against any religion to find out how God built us and to help heal people who are suffering from diseases of the brain,” Markram said.