On Tue, 24 Dec 2002, James A. Donald wrote: > On the other hand, our inability to emulate a nematode, or the
At individual level? We're lacking data. There are slices of the worm (<http://leitl.org/worm.png>, raw tiff is about 32 MBytes) from Durbin's work, and a few reconstructions, but there is no 3d assembly from a single individual. Nevertheless the entire circuit is known, and useful models exist. Have you seen NemaSys? <http://www.csi.uoregon.edu/projects/celegans/> It will be continued shortly. In general you'll find things with the worm don't look all that bleak: <http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=elegans+simulation&btnG=Google+Search> > a portion of the retina, is grounds for concern. This does not > indicate that the mystery is QM, but does suggest that there is > some mystery -- some special quality either of individual > neurons or very small networks of neurons that we have not yet > grasped. There's no mystery. There's just lots of hard work to be done if you want to model it from first principles (xref Virtual Cell and E-Cell). If you just want to model a few seconds or minutes of a network you have to characterize it first. With current technology, this results in producing and processing lots of TEM micrograph from tissue slices. We're talking about man-years of highly skilled operators and ditto grad students. And since this has been done before, no one is going to repeat it on a whole critter. > It is unsurprising that with current computing power we should > be unable to emulate an ant, but inability to emulate a > nematode is troubling. The crunch power is there. We're lacking a good enough model, and empirical data to feed that nonexisting model. Given that economy has tanked, and that the future for Comp. Sci. is not all that starry-eyed anymore perhaps we'll more bright people go into sciences instead of after the quick buck in the industry.
