Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/5039
z 54 winter 2009 Is Ken Hayworth Building the Instruments for Uploading Brains? AINEKO here at h+ Magazine, we love DIyers and garage entrepreneurs who work in the "nBIc" (nano, bio, info, and cogno) fields. We recently visited harvard University's center for Brain Science where we came across a particularly inspiring example. In order to understand the brain's function, neuroscientists must be able to map out its basic neuronal circuits. A neuronal circuit (for example, a thalamocortical circuit) typically spans quite a large volume of brain tissue (tens of cubic millimeters). At the same time, the axonal and dendritic processes comprising such a circuit are so fine and so tortuously interconnected that only electron microscopy of ultrathin (50nm) serial sections can resolve their connectivity. No current techniques can image so large a volume of tissue at such fine resolution. While working as a computer scientist and engineer at the Jet Propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, Ken Hayworth says that he was inspired by a paper he read by Xerox PARC's Ralph Merkle on "large Scale Analysis of Neural Structures." In 1989, Merkle wrote that we should be able to reverse engineer the human brain in the near future using advanced electron microscopy, and new slicing, staining and computational analysis algorithms. Hayworth, a cryonicist (he's signed up with Alcor to be cryopreserved upon his death in the hopes of being repaired and revived by a future technology), immediately saw that understanding the circuitry of the brain was a necessary first step towards mind uploading. His interest in developing new neuroanatomical mapping instruments stems from his frustration with the lack of neuroanatomical knowledge currently available on the circuits and systems of the higher-level visual system in mammals. So Ken started applying to grad schools and interviewing with neuroscientists about his plans to build a high-throughput brain-slicing machine. Time after time, he was rejected: either because he didn't have the academic background they were expecting, or because the professors wanted a lab slave and not someone with his own plans. Finally, he was offered admission by a professor at u.S.C. conducting psychophysical research in human vision. Fascinated by the topic, Hayworth accepted, even though it meant putting off his brain-slicing experiments. After his second year of grad school, Hayworth started working on his brain-slicing idea again. As he began attending neuroscience conferences and telling people about his machine, he faced ridicule ("that can't be done") and scorn for focusing on equipment rather than the brain itself. unperturbed, Ken built a prototype that demonstrated the concept sufficiently well to attract the interest of a Harvard professor interested in high-throughput neural circuit mapping. Together they submitted a proposal to the McKnight Endowment Fund to bring his project to the next level. Much to his surprise, he won a $200,000 grant and with it a chance to work at the Center for Brain Science at Harvard university. There he built the ATluM (Automatic Tape-collecting lathe ultramicrotome), the first machine to demonstrate the fully automatic collection of brain slices thin enough to view in an electron microscope and thus image at nanometer resolution. No one is laughing now. Work on ATluM2 is reaching nearly $1 million in cost, and Ken is getting requests from neuroscientists worldwide who see the value of obtaining such a machine to build a library of brain slices for examination and scanning using an automated system. This Matrix-like immortality would be the ultimate backup of ourselves. This This