What to do with a cool €1 billion? How about "build a CERN for the brain"?
That's what Henry Markram, director of the Human Brain Project (HBP), intends to do now that the project has won one of two €1 billion European research prizes, to be paid out over the next 10 years. The other winner is a project that aims to unlock the potential of supermaterial graphene.
The HBP is a quest to simulate a brain in a supercomputer. It is the successor to the Blue Brain Project, which kicked off in 2005 and succeeded in modelling the cortical column of a rat brain on a cellular level. According to a project spokesperson from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the next stage is to move on to the human brain. This will involving "expanding in all directions" and making the models bigger and more detailed.
The hope is that the model, once built, will be used to identify biomarkers that could be used to diagnose neurodegenerative diseases, to test combinations of different drugs and to help build neuromorphic computers based on components found in the brain. Researchers from around the world will be able to use the simulation in a similar way to how astronomers would reserve observation time on a telescope.
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