Complex Living Brain Simulation Replicates Sensory Rat Behaviour (cell.com)

New submitter physick writes: The Blue Brain project at EPFL, Switzerland today published the results of more than 10 years work in reconstructing a cellular model of a piece of the somatosensory cortex of a juvenile rat. The paper in Cell describes the process of painstakingly assembling tens of thousands of digital neurons, establishing the location of their synapses, and simulating the resulting neocortical microcircuit on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. “This is a first draft reconstruction of a piece of neocortex and it’s beautiful,” said Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. “It’s like a fundamental building block of the brain.”

Comments

Isn't it a bit late?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

So I guess the implosion of the Human Brain Project has FINALLY gotten Dr Markram to publish something on brain simulation? He might have deflected a lot of criticism and saved himself a lot of grief if he'd done this 2 or 3 years ago.

Re:Isn't it a bit late?

[SuricouRaven]

They are trying to reverse engineer one the most complicated structures in the known universe, which operates on principles unlike those of any construct of human engineering. Even greatly simplified simulations of the most miniscule parts require a supercomputer to run - and that's just for rats. Do you expect progress to be rapid?

Re:I for one

[Tablizer]

Congress?

Re:I for one

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Congress? Oh no, that would assume they have brains, lol.

Honestly, I think a Beowulf cluster of synthetic rat brains would be more productive than the whack jobs we have in Congress right now.

WHOOSHHH!!!!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I think you should read up on the Human Brain Project. Markram has been doing this rat brain thing for 10 years now, and he's launched a billion Euro super project based on it, yet this is the FIRST time he's ever published any results. The HBP is also crashing and burning right now, bigtime. In fact it looks like Markram is pretty much been kicked off it.

Re:WHOOSHHH!!!!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Well, the whole rest of the neuroscience community pretty much rose up in rebellion. It turns out the structure of the HBP was pretty much entirely whatever Markram wanted it to be, it was his little dictatorship and he was answerable to nobody in effect due to the way he structured things. The EC gave him virtually carte blanc, didn't properly oversee the project, etc etc etc. There's a long and complex litany of issues. Finally the outcries of the rest of the field became so deafening that they HAD to look into it. A panel was formed, etc. Markram is effectively dethrowned at this point, though I guess technically he's still the head of the project for the time being. The entire thrust of the endeavour has been renegotiated, its now designed to be a project developing technological support and software/hardware infrastructure to support neuroscience research. The 'build a human brain simulation' goal is perhaps not gone, but its not realistically expected to be accomplished or even attempted within the scope of the HBP as it exists today. Its still an open question what level of funding the whole effort will retain, it was a $1.3 billion project, but it could well be scaled back to 10 or 20% of that.

And one of the big issues is that Markram was just pushing his research agenda, yet he'd never formally published anything on the last 10 years of research with IBM! Nobody really has any idea except his pop science articles about what exactly he's actually accomplished. The whole notion of throwing EUR 1.0 billion into a research project that's never published a single result was frankly absurd.

Now, maybe Markram's goals are valid and we'd gain some great insight or at least a hugely valuable experimental tool, if we could execute his vision, but its simply not clear that it CAN be executed. This publication is the VERY FIRST one that can be evaluated on its merits to help come up with an answer to that question. The fact that Markram didn't publish SOMETHING at least 3-5 years ago is crazy. Either he's very shy of criticism or has a huge ego (and the later is thought to be the case anyway).

Its a hot mess in any case, and this publication is just a very interesting footnote to the greater story.

Re:WHOOSHHH!!!!

[NoImNotNineVolt]

If you end up with a simulation that is as hard to understand as the actual brain, what have you gained?

Determining the presence/absence of interesting emergent properties alone would be invaluable.

The value MUST all be in the process, not the result, so why fix now on one specific result which may not prove to be the best choice?

See, this is where I disagree entirely. There are those who seek to gain some fundamental understanding of the brain, and then there are those who believe that a brute-force approach to simulating the brain might lead to the creation of virtual brains with emergent properties similar to those observed in biological brains. I fall into the latter camp. I just want to see what happens.

Granted, I can see why people might take issue with a $1.3B project that amounts to "let's just do something ridiculous and see what happens!"

Re:WHOOSHHH!!!!

[physick]

Let's examine a few points:

1) " the whole rest of the neuroscience community pretty much rose up in rebellion."

156 people signed an open letter that was started by a tiny number of neuroscientists who disagreed with the HBP premises; fair enough. Disagreeing is good. But this is hardly " the whole rest of neuroscience". There are, I believe, more than 80 universities and research institutes in the HBP, and several hundred people work on it. So, several hundred people disagreed with several hundred other people.

After the letter was published, a lot more people signed it (800 or so) but not all of them are scientists as you can see here (http://www.neurofuture.eu). If you read some of these comments they are illuminating as to motives. I quote:

"As a clinical neuroscientist I am convinced that the human brain project does not succeed. The ressources should be used for more promising research in clinical neuroscience"

2) "HBP was pretty much entirely whatever Markram wanted it to be" "And one of the big issues is that Markram was just pushing his research agenda, ."

If by "pushing his agenda" you mean writing a grant application that says " I am going to do X" and then getting the money and then doing "X", what's wrong with this? It's how science gets funded. The HBP won the contest (actually, half the context, the graphene flagship won the other half), so they get to spend the money in the way that they said they would.

3) " if we could execute his vision, but its simply not clear that it CAN be executed."

That's why it's called research. Some smart people think it can be done, other smart people don't. It takes a while to publish a paper based on 10 years work with dozens of collaborators. Now that the work is in Cell, let's see what people can make of it.

4) "he'd never formally published anything on the last 10 years of research with IBM! "
"This publication is the VERY FIRST one that can be evaluated on its merits"
" this publication is just a very interesting footnote to the greater story."

So, first you castigate Markram for not publishing anything, and then when he does, it's just a footnote.

In a project of this size, there are bound to be teething problems and probably mistakes. They can be corrected. What surprises me is the level of animosity, ad hominem arguments and plain spite against a project that won an open contest to pursue a well-publicised research goal. Why people who don't share that goal, and are not in the project, should dictate the terms of the project seems to defeat the point of giving the grant.

Full disclosure: I work on the HBP.

Re:WHOOSHHH!!!!

[physick]

Thanks for your comments. I think maybe a lot of the management problems arose because the FET flagships were a new funding mechanism, and the EC may not have had clear ideas how they should be managed. Management problems have certainly loomed large in the HBP, but I think they have still been blown out of proportion. I wonder if the FET mechanism is only a beta version, and next time the EC will devise the release version. After all, the EC has many goals that are not only scientific, and 0.5 billion is not in european terms a huge amount (think Greece bailout funds). From the EC point of view, if side products of the HBP research led to a 1% increase in european employment and proved that brain simulations were not possible, the EC would be delighted.

"The objections were so serious, so widespread, and involved such highly successful and influential academics"

It is not clear to me that this is true. Some highly influential people have blown up a story that has flown in the press, but that does not mean the objections are serious. The press, including the scientific press, love a good battle, and being negative about something that costs a lot of money (waste!) is more saleable than describing the truth about a complex story. And even if some influential academics don't like the project, that is not evidence that they are right and the project is wrong. The HBP also has a lot of influential scientists on board, whose arguments do not get so much coverage.

  " If something is known to be impossible or its value can't be established then maybe it isn't a suitable target for such large-scale research ". Clearly, if it is "known" to be impossible, there is no point doing it. But in the HBP case, a certain subset of neuroscientists think a cellular level simulation of the mammalian brain is either impossible or not worth doing. This is not the same as it being impossible, Maybe the HBP would demonstrate its possibility or impossibility. Its a judgement call whether that knowledge is worth 0.5 Billion euros ( not 1 billion as all the press report, as graphene gets the other half, and the partners in the project have to stump up the matching funds).

By comparison, when the Apollo missions started, rockets failed and people died, and it was not known that it was possible to survive a journey to the moon and back. But people building trains did not get to interfere in the development of rockets.

Finally, about publications: there are more papers that have been published now than just the Cell one. Maybe, earlier publication would have been better, but I doubt that it would have changed the minds of those scientists who object to the principle of a brain simulation. And this is, for me, the big point. Some arguments against the HBP are of the form "its badly managed, too concentrated in a few hands, not obviously worth the money" - these are reasonable arguments, and the mediation committee have addressed them and the HBP is taking them on board. But the other arguments, especially those expressed in the open letter, and Nature commentaries, are just invective and not subject to rational argument. Go and read some of the comments on the letter. These comment authors are not interested in the finer details of the argument, they just hate the idea of a brain simulation, or they hate Markram, or they hate the money going to someone else. And this, for me, is the depressing aspect for a community that is supposed to be made up of rational scientists.