Hi ! Very interesting post, I agree that connectomics might be most interesting for the “other stuff” and perhaps not the cortical areas. Well sourced post overall, but I wanted to add my perspective, as someone recently come to work in micro scale connectomics. I think you are not crazy to hope for those timelines, but I think you are unfortunately wrong. Led by our lab at Princeton, we have released the first adult whole brain fruit fly connectome: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v1 it is a great milestone, and some are already... (read more)
I’m not sure what you think my expectations are. I wrote “I am not crazy to hope for whole primate-brain connectomes in the 2020s and whole human-brain connectomes in the 2030s, if all goes well.“ That’s not the same as saying “I expect those things”; it’s more like “those things are not completely impossible”. I’m not an expert but my current understanding is (1) you’re right that existing tech doesn’t scale well enough (absent insane investment of resources), (2) it’s not impossible that near-future tech could scale much better than current tech. I’m particularly thinking of the neuron-barcoding technique that E11 is trying to develop, which would (if I understand correctly) make registration of neurons between different slices easy and automatic and essentially perfect. Again, I’m not an expert, and you can correct me. I appreciate your comment.
Hi ! Very interesting post, I agree that connectomics might be most interesting for the “other stuff” and perhaps not the cortical areas. Well sourced post overall, but I wanted to add my perspective, as someone recently come to work in micro scale connectomics. I think you are not crazy to hope for those timelines, but I think you are unfortunately wrong. Led by our lab at Princeton, we have released the first adult whole brain fruit fly connectome: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.27.546656v1 it is a great milestone, and some are already... (read more)