How a Transparent Fish May Help Decode the Brain
Smithsonian Magazine | July 2015An outspoken Harvard neuroscientist is tackling the wondrous challenge of understanding the workings of the brainIn televised remarks from the East Room of the White House on April 2, 2013, President Obama unveiled a scientific mission as grand as the Apollo program. The goal wasn’t outer space, but a frontier every bit as bewitching: the human brain. Obama challenged the nation’s “most imaginative and effective researchers” to map in real time the flickerings of all 100 billion nerve cells in the brain of a living person, a voyage deep into the neural cosmos never attempted at so fine a scale. A panoramic view of electric pulses pinballing across the brain could lead to major new understandings of how we think, remember and learn, and how ills from autism to Alzheimer’s rewire our mental circuitry. “We have a chance to improve the lives of not just millions,” the president said, “but billions of people on this planet. Read more here.