经济学人科技类文章中英双语

The Brain Activity Map

绘制大脑活动地图

Hard cell

棘手的细胞

An ambitious project to map the brain is in the works. Possibly too ambitious

一个绘制大脑活动地图的宏伟计划正在准备当中，或许有些太宏伟了

NEWS of what protagonists hope will be America’s next big science project continues to dribble out.

有关其发起人心中下一个科学大工程的新闻报道层出不穷。

A leak to the New York Times, published on February 17th, let the cat out of the bag, with a report that Barack Obama’s administration is thinking of sponsoring what will be known as the Brain Activity Map.

2月17日，《纽约时报》刊登的一位线人报告终于泄露了秘密，报告称奥巴马政府正在考虑赞助将被称为“大脑活动地图”的计划。

And on March 7th several of those protagonists published a manifesto for the project in Science.

3月7日，部分发起人在《科学》杂志上发表声明证实了这一计划。

The purpose of BAM is to change the scale at which the brain is understood. “大脑活动地图”计划的目标是改变人们在认知大脑时采用的度量方法。

At the moment, neuroscience operates at two disconnected levels.

眼下，神经学的研究处在两个断开的层次。

The higher one, where the dimensions of features are measured in centimetres, has many techniques at its disposal, notably functional magnetic-res onance imaging, which measures changes in tissues’ fuel consumption.

在相对宏观的层次当中各个特征的规模用厘米来衡量，有很多技术可以使用，尤其是用来测量组织中能量消耗变动情况的核磁共振成像技术。

This lets researchers see which bits of the brain are active in particular tasks—as long as those tasks can be performed by a person lying down inside a scanner.

该技术可使研究人员找出在完成具体的任务时，大脑的哪些部分处于活跃状态。At the other end of the scale, where features are measured in microns, lots of research has been done on how individual nerve cells work, how messages are sent from one to another, and how the connections between cells strengthen and weaken as memories are formed.

而另一个度量的层次则要求用微米来测量各种特征，这一层次的研究很多都是关于单个神经细胞是如何工作的、信息在神经细胞之间是如何传递的以及当产生记忆的时候神经细胞之间的联系是如何得到加强和减弱的。

Between these two, though, all is darkness.

然而，位于这两个层次之间的研究还处于一片漆黑当中。

It is like trying to navigate America with an atlas that shows the states, the big cities and the main highways, and has a few street maps of local neighbourhoods, but displays nothing in between.

这就好比当你要在美国寻找自己的前进方向时，手里却只有一副如下的地图册：上面只显示各州轮廓、各都市的坐落点、干线公路以及一些社区街道，除此之外别无它物。

BAM, if all goes well, will yield plans of entire towns and villages, and start to fill in the road network.

如果“大脑活动地图”计划进展顺利的话，就能得到完整的城市和村落规划图，道路网也将完善。

It will also, to push the analogy to breaking point, let a user look at actual traffic flows on the roads in question, and even manipulate the road signs, in order to understand how particular communities work.

它还能使用户能够看到自己备选道路的实际交通情况，甚至还能通过操纵道路标志来了解具体地区是怎样运作的，将脑图、地图这一类比给打破。

The mappers’ aim is to find out how nerve cells collaborate to process information.

制图者的目标是找出神经细胞是如何共同处理信息的。

That means looking at the connections between hundreds, thousands and even millions of adjacent cells—and doing so, crucially, while those cells are still alive, rather than after they have been sliced and diced for microscopic examination.

这就意味着要研究成百上千甚至上百万的相邻细胞之间有何种关联，关键在于这一研究还要在这些细胞存活的时候进行，而不是把它们切片后放在显微镜下观察。This will require a new set of tools.

要做到这一点就需要一套新的工具。

And the guts of the BAM proposal are that the American taxpayer should provide those tools.

“大脑活动地图”提案的大胆之处在于它认为美国纳税人应该出钱提供这些工具。It is thus no coincidence that the lead author of the paper, Paul Alivisatos, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a materials scientist, not a neuroscientist.

因此，由材料学家保罗?阿里维萨多而非神经学家来主笔该提案并非什么巧合。Dr Alivisatos and his ten colleagues would like their new tools to be able to record, simultaneously, the activity of millions of nerve cells. 阿里维萨多博士和他的10个同事希望他们的新工具能同时记录数百万神经细胞的活动情况；

Then, having done the recording, they would like a second toolkit that lets them manipulate each cell at will, to see what effect that has on the rest of the circuit.

做完记录后，他们还想要能自由操纵每个神经细胞的第二套工具，以便找出这样的操作对细胞周围有何影响；

Finally, to handle the unprecedented amounts of data that the first and second steps will generate, they would like a new set of computing hardware and software.

最后，为了处理前面两个步骤所产生的空前的海量数据，他们还想要一套新的计算机软硬件。