最新一期的Smithsonian雜誌里關於Dr.Florian Engert的研究介紹，非常有趣，發人深省：

http://microsite.smithsonianmag.com/mag-july-august-2015/how-a-transparent-fish-may-help-decode-the-brain.html

How a Transparent Fish May Help Decode the Brain

An outspoken Harvard neuroscientist is tackling the wondrous challenge of understanding the workings of the brain

“

Scientists involved with the effort envision a stepladder approach, working up from roundworms (300 neurons), baby zebrafish and fruit flies (100,000 each) to mice (75 million) and monkeys (6 billion for the macaque) before summiting the Himalaya of the human brain (nearly 100 billion). In some ways, the initiative is now proceeding on all those fronts simultaneously. Scientists are studying parts of the human brain while taking a more holistic approach in lab animals. And they are experimenting with an array of tools—lasers, ultrathin probes, chemical tags, high-tech ultrasound, light-activated molecules, next-generation fMRIs and PET scanners—in hopes of recording at high resolution from deep inside nontransparent brains.

Chun, who helped convince the White House to launch the BRAIN Initiative, has likened the zebrafish work to an express elevator. “We were still on the first floor, trying to get to the second floor,” she says. “Then out of nowhere, we went to the tenth floor.”

It wasn’t until Engert’s paper—and another, the next year, from Misha Ahrens, who made zebrafish mind-reading dramatically faster—that “We thought, OK, this initiative could be possible,” Chun said. “The leap of faith they made was tremendous.”

She expects the payoffs for human health, for conditions like epilepsy, could come in just five years. Treatments for less-understood ailments—from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to autism, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder—are further off, but hardly out of reach. By comparing the brains of healthy people, cell by cell, with those with neural disorders, scientists may be able to isolate the circuits whose breakdown prefigures disease. Those discoveries could spur development of new drugs and therapies. Zebrafish, which are vertebrates and thus have brains similar to our own, are already leading the way. They’re being used to test drugs and to study the neurobiology of anxiety, sleep and alcohol abuse.

Engert, though, is happy to leave such pursuits to other scientists. He says he never set out to image activity in a brain’s every cell. It was just an add-on to the “Matrix” experiment—a lark to silence a debate about whether such recording was even possible. He is driven by questions without obvious applications: How does a zebrafish react to certain kinds of stimuli? Which neural circuits fire when fish swim, hunt or flee predators? What experiments offer the best look at zebrafish learning?

He wants the public and politicians to value neuroscience for the same reasons they do the Hubble Space Telescope, the Large Hadron Collider or the Mars rover. None of these touch everyday lives directly, but they are funded because there is beauty in unraveling the universe’s mysteries. He believes that quest will be set back if the BRAIN Initiative is oversold. “The problem,” he says, “is that if we don’t solve Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, it will look like we failed at our appointed tasks and people will take the money away and say, ‘Nice try, no cigar.’” 

As for the philosophical questions raised by this work—whether studying the brain will teach us anything about the nature of human consciousness, or the idea of a soul; whether science will one day reduce the stuff of our humanity to a cold calculus of algorithmic code—he’s agnostic.

We met one evening at the bright purple house where he lives with Polina Kehayova, a drug researcher who moonlights as a Boston Symphony soprano, and their 6-year-old daughter. Over lentil stew, Engert recalled something the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky once said: “If we can’t explain why a cockroach decides to turn left, how can we explain why a human being decides to do something?””