Obama confirms neuroscience is the coolest, most important technology on earth
Autore: ExtremeTech
We feel strongly that an effort such as the Brain Activity Map Project should be put squarely in the public domain … it makes sense for this project to be run as a public enterprise with unrestricted access to its resulting data. Never mind that these sensible words were written last year in a paper published in the journal Neuron — a closed-access, pay-walled publication — that paper is now worth about $ 3 billion in funding. It appears that The New York Times, while still weathering doubt amid the recent Tesla Motors debacle, has connected the dots and put a more specific face on Obama’s general call for funding brain research at his recent State of the Union Address.
After the SOTUA last Tuesday, Francis Collins (@NIHDirector) fortuitously tweeted his pleasure with Obama’s mentioning of the Brain Activity Map (BAM) in his speech. By all measures the announcement by Collins appears to point to a similarly-titled Neuron paper dealing with the new field of functional connectomics (research paper linked at the bottom). Not to be outdone by the recent disclosure of the European Human Brain Project to simulate a mind, the Obama Administration will be seeking $ 300 million a year over the next decade for the new research in their budget proposal next month. The most visible author on the paper, George Church, has made quite a name for himself in the years since the Human Genome Project, particularly in the fields of personal genomics, rapid gene sequencing technologies, and storing data with DNA. He has now set his sights on the brain.
In a remarkable confluence of ideas, Church’s $ 3 billion dollar paper proposes to endow neurons with the ability to write the history of their spiking activity onto a ticker tape made of DNA. While neurons can maintain spike rates at over 100Hz, the molecular machines that normally read, write, and edit DNA would have no trouble keeping up with this pace. Previously, Anthony Zador had published an equally preposterous and ingenious theoretical paper entitled “Sequencing the Connectome,” where he devised a possible way to trace neural circuits using virally-encoded DNA barcodes. If DNA can be used to represent connections, maybe it can also be used to store spike history — or so the thinking goes.
The machines which normally copy DNA, known as DNA polymerases (DNAPs or perhaps more descriptively, DNApols), can be re-engineered to make predictable errors when the concentration of doubly-charged ions like calcium 2+ or magnesium 2+ changes in the cell. When neurons spike and undergo a voltage swing, channels placed in the cell membrane open and let these ions inside, causing the ion-sensitive DNApol to write a random, or at least unintended, DNA base group to the template. The authors go on to show that with sufficient redundancy, any uncertainty in the spike history record can be arbitrarily reduced. The authors note that a synthetic cell five microns in diameter could hold at least 6 billion base pairs of DNA, which could encode seven days of spiking data at 100Hz with 100-fold redundancy.
Though something resembling Church’s machines may eventually find a place in future brains, the concept is at this point incomplete. Suppose all goes well and you have your ticker tape of data being printed in say, several thousand of your favorite neurons — your kingpin cells if you will. What do you do with the tape? Church really has reached his limit here. Although some mention is made of nanoscale wireless transmission as a way to get the data out, if you can already do something like that, why bother to write the tape? A buffer of some sort, like the ticker tape, might in some cases be convenient to have as it could be queued up as neurons take turns transmitting data on the same channel. A slower way to read the tape would be to additionally encode the printed activity templates with the Zador barcode address of the neuron and then add functional group that mark it for packaging and excretion. Then everything could get deposited in the blood or perhaps less hostile environments like the cerebral spinal fluid, where it can be collected and measured.
Church is still at his heart a DNA guy, and although his concepts, funding draw, and willingness to migrate into the world of neuroscience are a welcome additions, the tools he describes still need extensive development. It is encouraging that a recent paper expanding the DNA template concept was just published in PLOSone and adds the wizard in the field of optogenetics, Ed Boyden, to the ranks of its authors. It would however be comforting to see a few more details on exactly how to read the data out from spike history templates, preferably suffixed with actual units of milliwatts or nanowatts of transmitting power.
Next page: Is DNA really the future? What about silicon, computer implants?
The First Hanoverians
-The Whigs and the Tories
The Whigs and the Tories were the first political parties in Britain. The Tories had emerged in 1679-1680 and descended from the Royalists; their name was taken from the 17th century-Irish outlaws who killed English settlers. They supported the divine right of monarchy and opposed religious toleration; the Church of England and the landowners sided with them. They enjoyed a period of power during the reign of Queen Anne, but went into decline after the Hanoverian succession. The title “Tory” has survived as a nickname for ‘conservative’.
Also the Whigs, a rude name for ‘cattle drivers’, emerged in 1679-1680, as descendants of the Parliamentarians. They were in power continuously from 1714 to 1760 and pressed for industrial and commercial development, a vigorous foreign policy, and religious toleration. Their party was supported by many of the wealthy and commercial classes. Whig ministers used to meet without the King, and their meetings developed into the kind of government by Cabinet, which Britain still has today. At first, all Cabinet ministers were equal but, as time went by, certain ministers began to lead others. The leading minister in the Cabinet came to be known as the Prime Minister.
-The first Prime Minister
The first Prime Minister was Sir Robert Walpole(1676-1745).
Although he was a Whig, he was the son of a Norfolk landowner and remained very much like a squire all his life. He was in power for over twenty years(1721-1742)and, until almost the end of his period of office, managed to keep England out of foreign conflicts so that trade could flourish and taxes could be kept down. Trade was stimulated by the removal of customs duties on exports and on imports of raw materials, but in 1723 tea, coffee and chocolate became subject to taxation. These were smuggled into the country and the same time increased government income. From 1726 Walpole attacked in the opposition newspaper The Craftsman and his government was accused of corruption. He did, however, survive a change of monarch, when George I died and was succeeded by his son, George II(1727-1760).