On 11/17/2014 10:05 PM, Rich Cooper wrote:
> There is an intriguing paper in PNAS on the teensy 302 neurons
> in the worm C. Elegans (01)
Following is an article from the _Scientific American_,
which gives a more general overview of the issues: (02)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connectome/
The Connectome Debate: Is Mapping the Mind of a Worm Worth It? (03)
The two concluding paragraphs of that article: (04)
> Because any brain or nervous system is so much more complex than
> what a connectome by itself represents, Movshon is certainly not
> alone in thinking that researchers' limited resources are better
> devoted to other areas of neuroscience. "I'm all in favor of Seung
> and others," Bargmann says, "but I don't think we should have a
> Manhattan Project for the connectome with such a huge amount of
> resources. We are not quite good enough at reading them. It wasn't
> like the human genome project, where we knew how to sequence DNA
> and said, 'Yeah, let's go for it!' Scaling up connectomes is a
> different issue."
>
> Oliver Hobert of Columbia, another longtime C. elegans researcher,
> agrees that connectomics only scratches the surface. "It's like a
> road map that tells you where cars can drive, but does not tell
> you when or where cars are actually driving," he says. "Still, >
>connectomics of C. elegans has given us wonderful testable hypotheses
> in terms of how neural circuits work. What we have learned from
> C. elegans diagrams are not just specific worm behaviors—they are
> logical principles common to much of biology." (05)
John (06)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J (07)
|