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Science and technology
科學技術
The Brain Activity Map
繪制大腦活動地圖
Hard cell
棘手的細胞
An ambitious project to map the brain is in the works. Possibly too ambitious
一個繪制大腦活動地圖的宏偉計劃正在準備當中，或許有些太宏偉了
NEWS of what protagonists hope will be America's next big science project continues to dribble out.
有關其發(fā)起人心中下一個科學大工程的新聞報道層出不窮。
A leak to the New York Times, published on February 17th, let the cat out of the bag, with a report that Barack Obama's administration is thinking of sponsoring what will be known as the Brain Activity Map.
2月17日，《紐約時報》刊登的一位線人報告終于泄露了秘密，報告稱奧巴馬政府正在考慮贊助將被稱為大腦活動地圖的計劃。
And on March 7th several of those protagonists published a manifesto for the project in Science.
3月7日，部分發(fā)起人在《科學》雜志上發(fā)表聲明證實了這一計劃。
The purpose of BAM is to change the scale at which the brain is understood.
大腦活動地圖計劃的目標是改變?nèi)藗冊谡J知大腦時采用的度量方法。
At the moment, neuroscience operates at two disconnected levels.
眼下，神經(jīng)學的研究處在兩個斷開的層次。
The higher one, where the dimensions of features are measured in centimetres, has many techniques at its disposal, notably functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which measures changes in tissues' fuel consumption.
在相對宏觀的層次當中各個特征的規(guī)模用厘米來衡量，有很多技術可以使用，尤其是用來測量組織中能量消耗變動情況的核磁共振成像技術。
This lets researchers see which bits of the brain are active in particular tasks—as long as those tasks can be performed by a person lying down inside a scanner.
該技術可使研究人員找出在完成具體的任務時，大腦的哪些部分處于活躍狀態(tài)。
At the other end of the scale, where features are measured in microns, lots of research has been done on how individual nerve cells work, how messages are sent from one to another, and how the connections between cells strengthen and weaken as memories are formed.
而另一個度量的層次則要求用微米來測量各種特征，這一層次的研究很多都是關于單個神經(jīng)細胞是如何工作的、信息在神經(jīng)細胞之間是如何傳遞的以及當產(chǎn)生記憶的時候神經(jīng)細胞之間的聯(lián)系是如何得到加強和減弱的。
Between these two, though, all is darkness.
然而，位于這兩個層次之間的研究還處于一片漆黑當中。
It is like trying to navigate America with an atlas that shows the states, the big cities and the main highways, and has a few street maps of local neighbourhoods, but displays nothing in between.
這就好比當你要在美國尋找自己的前進方向時，手里卻只有一副如下的地圖冊：上面只顯示各州輪廓、各都市的坐落點、干線公路以及一些社區(qū)街道，除此之外別無它物。
BAM, if all goes well, will yield plans of entire towns and villages, and start to fill in the road network.
如果大腦活動地圖計劃進展順利的話，就能得到完整的城市和村落規(guī)劃圖，道路網(wǎng)也將完善。
It will also, to push the analogy to breaking point, let a user look at actual traffic flows on the roads in question, and even manipulate the road signs, in order to understand how particular communities work.
它還能使用戶能夠看到自己備選道路的實際交通情況，甚至還能通過操縱道路標志來了解具體地區(qū)是怎樣運作的，將腦圖、地圖這一類比給打破。
The mappers' aim is to find out how nerve cells collaborate to process information.
制圖者的目標是找出神經(jīng)細胞是如何共同處理信息的。
That means looking at the connections between hundreds, thousands and even millions of adjacent cells—and doing so, crucially, while those cells are still alive, rather than after they have been sliced and diced for microscopic examination.
這就意味著要研究成百上千甚至上百萬的相鄰細胞之間有何種關聯(lián)，關鍵在于這一研究還要在這些細胞存活的時候進行，而不是把它們切片后放在顯微鏡下觀察。
This will require a new set of tools.
要做到這一點就需要一套新的工具。
And the guts of the BAM proposal are that the American taxpayer should provide those tools.
大腦活動地圖提案的大膽之處在于它認為美國納稅人應該出錢提供這些工具。
It is thus no coincidence that the lead author of the paper, Paul Alivisatos, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a materials scientist, not a neuroscientist.
因此，由材料學家保羅?阿里維薩多而非神經(jīng)學家來主筆該提案并非什么巧合。
Dr Alivisatos and his ten colleagues would like their new tools to be able to record, simultaneously, the activity of millions of nerve cells.
阿里維薩多博士和他的10個同事希望他們的新工具能同時記錄數(shù)百萬神經(jīng)細胞的活動情況；
Then, having done the recording, they would like a second toolkit that lets them manipulate each cell at will, to see what effect that has on the rest of the circuit.
做完記錄后，他們還想要能自由操縱每個神經(jīng)細胞的第二套工具，以便找出這樣的操作對細胞周圍有何影響；
Finally, to handle the unprecedented amounts of data that the first and second steps will generate, they would like a new set of computing hardware and software.
最后，為了處理前面兩個步驟所產(chǎn)生的空前的海量數(shù)據(jù)，他們還想要一套新的計算機軟硬件。
A modest proposal, then.
如此看來這提案還不算過分嘛，
And one which is inducing polite scepticism from many neuroscientists who are not part of the charmed circle, and who fear their subject is about to be sacrificed to a juggernaut.
但它卻也引來了許多此小圈子外的神經(jīng)學家客氣的猜疑，他們擔心實驗被試會成為這一計劃的犧牲品。
Such scepticism is reasonable.
這種懷疑是合乎情理的。
The third part of the project, the computer side, should be doable.
該計劃的計算機部分是可行的，不論如何，這只不過是提高計算機的原有水平而已。
That is just a question of pushing harder in a direction things are, in any case, going.
但是前面兩部分你要怎么完成呢？誰都不知道。
How you would do the first two, though, is anybody's guess—and Dr Alivisatos and his colleagues are pretty sketchy about the details.
而且阿里維薩多和其同事對相關細節(jié)也說得相當籠統(tǒng)。
Thinking big, thinking small
高瞻遠矚也要低頭看路
What ideas there are draw heavily on the nascent field of nanotechnology.
現(xiàn)在能想到的辦法主要就是利用納米技術這一新領域，
This is Dr Alivisatos's particular province, and also that of the Kavli Foundation, which exists to advance fundamental research in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, neuroscience and theoretical physics.
這是阿里維薩多的專攻領域，也是美國科威利基金會專門支持的領域。該基金會的宗旨是推動天體物理學、納米技術、神經(jīng)學和理論物理學等領域的基礎研究，
A brain map would push two of those buttons, which accounts for the fact that five of the manifesto's authors work for institutes sponsored by this foundation.
一個大腦地圖計劃就會涉及到里面的兩個領域，這也解釋了《科學》雜志上的聲明人中有五個在該基金贊助的機構(gòu)工作這一事實。
But any successes that nanotechnology has enjoyed so far have been small beer compared with the devices that would be needed to interrogate nerve cells, record the results and transmit them back to base, let alone tell those nerve cells what to do.
但是，和審問神經(jīng)細胞、記錄審問結(jié)果并將審問結(jié)果傳回大本營所需要的設備相比，目前納米技術領域所取得一切成果都是些小把戲，就更別指望能用它來控制神經(jīng)細胞的行為了。
The protagonists would, they say, build up slowly, using humbler creatures than human beings as experimental subjects to start with.
該計劃的發(fā)起人說，他們會慢慢推進，首先使用比人類低級的生物作為實驗對象。
This was the approach taken by the Human Genome Project, which began with bacteria and yeast, progressed to worms, flies and mice, and only then tackled people.
人類基因組工程當初便是采取的這一途徑：一開始是細菌和酵母，再升級到蠕蟲、蒼蠅和老鼠，最后才是人類。
But the analogy is not quite a fair one.
但拿它做類比還不大合適，
When the genome project started,genomicists already had a basic understanding of how to go about it.
因為在基因組工程啟動時，遺傳學家對該如何進行已經(jīng)有了一個基本理解，
That understanding was vastly refined and improved by the application of several billion dollars.
這一理解在花費了數(shù)十億美元后得到了大大的提煉和改善。
But it was there from the beginning.
但人家一開始就有理解啊。
Going from existing methods of recording and manipulating cell activity, which rely on large electrodes, often connected to the outside world by physical wires, to the massively parallel, wireless system envisaged by Dr Alivisatos, is a different proposition.
記錄和操縱細胞活動的現(xiàn)有技術要依靠一些很大的電極，從這些技術跨越到阿里維薩多博士所設想的無線平行體系，相對基因組計劃而已，則是一個不同的命題。
It may be possible. But it requires a leap of faith.
這也許是可能的，但要讓人相信則需要信心的大飛躍。
The next few weeks will reveal whether that faith is shared by a cash-strapped president.
囊中羞澀的總統(tǒng)是否也有這種信心呢？答案將會在后面的幾周內(nèi)揭曉。
