The Human Genome Project (HGP) started out as a wild gleam in the eyes of a number of very forward-thinking 1980s scientists. Today, 40 years later, that Future belongs to All of Us.
The HGP also helped give rise to the much broader scientific discipline of Omics, with genomic follow-ons like proteomics and transcriptomics, with their associated proteomes and transcriptomes.
Next up: the connectome. Just as the HGP was started with the audacious goal of mapping the entire human genome, a “human connectome project” (HCP) would audaciously map the entire human connectome*. What’s a connectome? Definitions vary and have been evolving, but to parallel the definition (and usefulness) of a genome, a concise definition from Wikipedia is:
A connectome is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain
So a HCP would map every neural connection (synapse) in the human brain. There are about 6 billion DNA letters in the human genome. How many neural connections are there in the human connectome? Try about 100 trillion!! No problem.
OK, maybe a bit of a problem. How about starting with the mouse brain? Or, maybe, just a cubic millimeter of the mouse brain? Scientist have recently done that, generating 1400 terabytes (1.4 petabytes) of data!
So there’s a bit of a ways to go. But all this is nothing a decade or two and Moore’s law (a future post topic) can’t fix. And we’re looking forward to helping, much as with the HGP. Stay tuned.
*Back in 2009, the NIH actually spun up a program it called the Human Connectome Project, but the mapping it explored was at a much higher, less granular level. Nowhere near audacious enough any more.