Reverse Engineering The Brain
By Sally Adee
This is part of IEEE Spectrum's SPECIAL REPORT: THE SINGULARITY
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/6268
PHOTO: Timothy Archibald
What do fruit-fly brains have in common with microchips? That's not the setup for a bad joke; it's David
Adler's life. Under Adler's ultra sophisticated electron beam microscopes, advanced microprocessors
with transistors far smaller than red blood cells have been reduced to their wiring diagrams. Now the
noggin of the humble Drosophila melanogaster is next, as Adler is being courted by researchers at a
neurobiology wing of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to help them reverse engineer the human
brain. They're starting small, with the fruit fly.
Located in the green, rolling hills of Ashburn, in northern Virginia, the campus, known as Janelia Farm,
has been described as a kind of Bell Labs for neuro-biology. Its task is solving what Adler calls the most
important question in science: How exactly does the human brain do what it does? Lots of people are
trying to answer this question, and there's a growing impetus toward using high- definition brain scans to
find out how the brain works.
By Sally Adee
This is part of IEEE Spectrum's SPECIAL REPORT: THE SINGULARITY
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/6268
PHOTO: Timothy Archibald
What do fruit-fly brains have in common with microchips? That's not the setup for a bad joke; it's David
Adler's life. Under Adler's ultra sophisticated electron beam microscopes, advanced microprocessors
with transistors far smaller than red blood cells have been reduced to their wiring diagrams. Now the
noggin of the humble Drosophila melanogaster is next, as Adler is being courted by researchers at a
neurobiology wing of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to help them reverse engineer the human
brain. They're starting small, with the fruit fly.
Located in the green, rolling hills of Ashburn, in northern Virginia, the campus, known as Janelia Farm,
has been described as a kind of Bell Labs for neuro-biology. Its task is solving what Adler calls the most
important question in science: How exactly does the human brain do what it does? Lots of people are
trying to answer this question, and there's a growing impetus toward using high- definition brain scans to
find out how the brain works.
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