The Brain Harvesters Trying To Figure Out How The Mind Works

Just A Casual Day At The Office Slicing Human Brains

The race is on to create the first complete model of the human brain. 

Scientists around the world have been chopping up brains into tiny slices, taking pictures of their brain slivers and then stitching the pictures back together into 3D models of the mind. The goal is to build a map of all the neurons and synapses and dendrites in a brain and to find out how they’re all interconnected. If such a model, called the Connectome, existed, it could tell us for the first time how the brain actually works. Or at least that’s what one group of scientists think. Others think we may just be wasting a lot of time and money on this quest. 

(Still others think the Connectome could let us download our minds into computers and live forever. Hooray?!)

I spent some time recently at Harvard, which has a large collection of people using deli slicers to harvest brains and fancy machines to image them. They’re at the forefront of the Connectome work. 

It turns out that mapping a brain requires an absurd amount of computing power. So far, we’ve only managed to complete a model of a worm and a fly. Next up are mice and then hopefully humans. 

On my other travels, I visited a synthetic biology firm called Gingko Bioworks, which is trying to reshape manufacturing by manipulating DNA. It’s your everyday mad scientist stuff.  

Oh, and here is a start-up using satellites to try and measure the health of Mother Earth.