In a spartan office looking across Lake Geneva to the French Alps, Henry Markram is searching for a suitably big metaphor to describe his latest project. "It's going to be the Higgs boson of the brain, a Noah's archive of the mind," he says. "No, it's like a telescope that can span all the way across the universe of the brain from the micro the macro level."
We are talking about the Human Brain Project, Markram's audacious plan to build a working model of the human brain - from neuron to hemisphere level - and simulate it on a supercomputer within the next 10 years. When Markram first unveiled his idea at a TEDGlobal conference in Oxford four years ago, few of his peers took him seriously.
The brain was too complex, they said, and in any case there was no computer fast enough. Even last year when he presented a more detailed plan at a scientific meeting in Bern, showing how the requisite computer power would be available by 2020, many neuroscientists continued to insist it could not be done and dismissed his claims as hype.
Today, thanks to the largesse of the European Union, which awarded Markram euros 1bn last year to make his dream a reality, many of those naysayers are being forced to take him seriously. The gift, which comes on top of a state-of-the-art IBM Blue Gene computer from the Swiss government, makes Markram's unit at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne the biggest dog on the neuro block. It also gives Markram a headstart on brain-mapping projects in Japan and the US, where Barack Obama is hoping to persuade Congress to award $3bn to a similar initiative called Brain (so far Obama has pledged $100m).
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