After several years of research, 82 researchers from various institutions around the world recently released a report claiming that they were able to reconstruct a section of a rat's brain on a computer.
The researchers were supported by the Human Brain Project. This European project, running for more than 10 years, has more than $1 billion in funding. The report came from the Blue Brain Project which aims to create a digital reconstruction of a rat's brain. The ultimate goal of the project is to digitally recreate a human's brain on a computer.
Both projects, Human Brain Project and Blue Brain Project, were highly controversial. In 2014, hundreds of neuroscientists signed an open letter criticizing the projects as well as their feasibility of the reconstruction goal, according the New York Times.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Laussane professor and project head Henry Markram said that the recent development is just the first draft of a functioning map that has 30,000 brain cells. He added that their feat is not a proof of principle that a digital reconstruction of the human brain is possible, but he claims that it is a start.
Markram envisions a research tool capable of digitally encoding some characteristics of neurons as well as their connections. In order to build a digital version of a portion of rat brain, scientists used data from selected cells and then simulate certain kinds of brain activity.
According to the report published on the scientific journal Cell, the scientists were able to achieve the feat by using cellular synaptic organizing principles in order to create an anatomically detailed physiology and anatomy of a portion of a rat's brain.