Zack Lynch is author of The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World (St. Martin's Press, July 2009).
Up to now the biggest numbers game in biology had been run by the publicly financed Human Genome Project, which sequenced each of the three billion letters in the DNA code for a human being. "I know a neuroscientist who downloaded the Human Genome Project onto an Apple iPod," says Mark Boguski, an M.D. and Ph.D. who is a veteran of that project and who now directs the Brain Atlas Project at Allen Institute for Brain Science. "But that was 3 gigabytes, and we will be producing petabytes." Yes, your brain is very complex and this is why neuroinformatics will keep information technology vendors busy for many years to come.
Tracked on August 30, 2004 07:16 PM