人脑地图,百万神经元长征.docVIP

Connecting the Neural Dots By JOHN MARKOFF March 01, 2013 人脑地图，百万神经元的长征 In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents. 奥巴马总统为美国设定了绘制一份活跃的人脑地图的目标，他所选择的这一挑战，或许比结束阿富汗战争或与他的共和党对手寻求共识还要更加艰巨。 In more than a century of scientific inquiry into the interwoven cells known as neurons that make up the brain, researchers acknowledge they are only beginning to scratch the surface of a scientific challenge that is certain to prove vastly more complicated than sequencing the human genome. 人脑是由错综交织的神经元细胞构成的。科学家承认，一个多世纪以来，对大脑的探索才刚刚触及了这个巨大科学挑战的表层。研究大脑，必然比人类基因组测序更加复杂。 The Obama administration is hoping to announce as soon as next month its intention to assemble the pieces — and, even more challenging, the financing — for a decade-long research project that will have the goal of building a comprehensive map of the brain’s activity. 奥巴马政府希望最快在下月宣布这项计划的意向，整合领域内已有的研究，配置科研资金（这更有难度），启动这个为期10年的项目，最终绘制出一份记录人脑活动的完整的地图。 拉斐尔·尤斯特是哥伦比亚大学的一名神经学家，他希望从绘制老鼠大脑的地图开始。 At present, scientists are a long way from doing so. Before they can even begin the process, they have to develop the tools to examine the brain. And before they develop tools that will work on humans, they must succeed in doing so in a number of simpler species — assuming that what they learn can even be applied to humans. 目前，距离能做到这一点，科学家还有很远的路要走。在他们能启动这一程序之前，他们必须开发出分析大脑的仪器。而在他们开发出能适用于人类的仪器之前，他们必须先在一些较为简单的物种身上获得成功，假定在那些动物身上得出的结论能应用于人类的话。 The state of the art in animal research is to sample from roughly a thousand neurons simultaneously. The human brain has between 85 and 100 billion neurons. “For a human we must develop new techniques, and some of them from scratch,” said Dr. Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia who has pioneered the use of lasers to measure the activity of neurons in the cortex of mice. 动物研究当前的最高水平，是可以同时从约一千个神经元中取样。人脑有约850亿到1000亿个神经元。拉斐尔·尤斯特博士(Rafa