Lobsters

In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. ("Lobsters" - Charlie Stross)

The lobster nervous system is very simple compared to mammals. The neural circuits that control the lobster digestive system, including the stomatogastric ganglion, have been extensively mapped and studied, and those neurons have, in a sense, already been "uploaded" as a part of computer models of the stomatograstric neural network. Indeed, Stross was inspired by this research. Popular Science editor Gregory Mone investigated further for his article science fiction "posthumans":

A few days after I return to New York from the Plokta conference, I find the San Diego researchers* on the Web and check with Stross to make sure they’re the right ones. Then I forward a link to the first story in Accelerando, the aptly titled “Lobsters,” to the scientists. A few hours later, a physicist in the group, Henry Abarbanel, calls me. He’s excited but a little confused. Excited that his team’s work helped to inspire a massive SF novel, perplexed because he can’t find any specific reference to their research in the story, although there is lots of stuff about uploaded lobsters. We talk a bit about science fiction in general—he was an Asimov fan as a kid—and then Abarbanel explains what he and his colleagues are doing with those lobsters.

The research, led by biologist Allen Selverston, focused on the California spiny lobster because only 14 neurons govern a key part of its gastric tract. This number of neurons is unusually small, which makes the area easier to model. Still, understanding the neurobiology of those 14 neurons was not easy. It took Selverston 25 years. Then Abarbanel and his colleagues needed two more to figure out how to re-create the system electronically. This work, too, was difficult: Abarbanel likens the process to having all the parts of a 747 laid out on the floor of a hangar with no instruction manual on how to put them together to make an airplane.

All that work, and they’ve electronically simulated just 14 neurons. That’s a far cry from uploading the 10¹¹ neurons that make up the human brain. Naturally, I assume Abarbanel will laugh at the idea that uploading a human mind could ever be possible. But it turns out that he approves of Stross’s leaps of imagination. “Frankly, I don’t consider it to be crazy,” Abarbanel says. “Whether it’s five years or 10 years or 500 years, I have no doubt that we’ll figure out how to do it.”

Read "Lobsters", for Stross's take on what happens when the nervous systems of many lobsters are uploaded into the same computer.

*Abarbanel and Selverston are faculty at the UCSD Institute for Nonlinear Science . Selverston is the author of the stomatogastric ganglion article linked above.
Image from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Tags:science fiction, Stross

Not abandoned

Despite the look, this blog is not abandoned. I've switched to "New Blogger", and will be adding categories. In the mean time, I'll really really turn some of those draft posts into final versions. Honest!

The Genetics of Magic

The year-end edition of the British Medical Journal always covers topics that are typically overlooked in the biomedical literature during the rest of the year. This year Sreeram V Ramagopalan and colleagues have published a review of the literature* on the genetics of magic, "Origins of magic: review of genetic and epigenetic effects". Their conclusions:

Results Magic shows strong evidence of heritability, with familial aggregation and concordance in twins. Evidence suggests magical ability to be a quantitative trait. Specific magical skills, notably being able to speak to snakes, predict the future, and change hair colour, all seem heritable.

Conclusions A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expression may be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and MCR1.

They even propose a model of enhancer-driven gene regulation in individuals displaying the magical ability phenotype:

Now, like all good modern journals, BMJ allows comments on their articles (called "rapid responses" to make them sound less Live Journally, I suppose). One of the commenters has an excellent suggestion: a follow-up article on the heritability of Jedi powers. A tough research project since it would require sitting through Episodes I-III and reading the massive array related literature, but someone should definitely do it!

* The literature in this case being the Harry Potter series of books

Tags:magic, genetics, Harry Potter, Weasley family