The Beauty and the Beast

How can we evaluate the positive impact that visionary people can have on science? Should we support funneling large amounts of money to big projects? Both questions arose when I watched Noah Hutton’s film, In Silico .* I invited several prominent scientists to comment on the film’s main topic, modeling the human brain, in a special collection for eNeuro . The film tells the 10-year journey beginning with Henry Markram’s 2009 TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/henry\_markram\_a\_brain\_in\_a\_supercomputer), where he announced that the brain could be modeled within 10 years in a supercomputer. The scientific initiative began in 2005 at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne when Markram founded and directed the first scientific initiative toward his goal: the Blue Brain Project (https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/). Then, in 2012, the European Union selected the Human Brain Project (https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/), also then led by Markram, as one of two flagship programs to be awarded €1 billion over 10 years. Modeling the human brain was one objective (Destexhe, 2021). For a scientific and historical perspective on the Blue Brain Project and the Human Brain Project, you can refer to Yves Fregnac’s commentary (Fregnac, 2021). As indicated by Eve Marder (Marder, 2021), one cannot but fall for the beauty of the brain. This happened to me when I saw a Golgi staining of a Purkinje cell during my first visit to a neuroscience lab. My first research project was on a computer model of the cerebellum. I then discovered the beast: by tweaking the model parameters, I could make it behave as I wished. Other commentaries (Jirsa, 2021; Marder, 2021) mention that because of degeneracy (there are multiple solutions to the same problem), and because many important parameters were omitted (Fairhall, 2021), the probability to construct a working brain via the inclusion of parameters measured from different animals would be close to …