The Blue Brain Project (original) (raw)

2006, Nature Reviews Neuroscience

Alan Turing started off by wanting to "build the brain" and ended up with a computer. In the 60 years that have followed, computation speed has gone from 1 floating point operation per second (FLOPS) to over 250 trillion -by far the largest man-made growth rate of any kind in the ~10,000 years of human civilization. This is a mere blink of an eye, a single generation, in the 5 million years of human evolution and billions of years of organic life. What will the future hold -in the next 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years? These immense calcu lation speeds have revolutionized science, technology and medicine in numerous and profound ways. In particular, it is becoming increasingly possible to simulate some of nature's most intimate processes with exquisite accuracy, from atomic reactions to the folding of a single protein, gene networks, molecular interactions, the opening of an ion channel on the surface of a cell, and the detailed activity of a single neuron. As calculation speeds approach and go beyond the petaFLOPS range, it is becoming feasible to make the next series of quantum leaps to simulating networks of neurons, brain regions and, eventually, the whole brain. Turing may, after all, have provided the means by which to build the brain.