The Appeal of Scientific Heroism

In 2008, the journalist Jonah Lehrer paid a visit to a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, to profile Henry Markram, a world-renowned neuroscientist. Markram, a South African, had trained at a series of élite institutions in Israel, the United States, and Germany; in the nineties, he published foundational papers on neural connections and synaptic activity. Markram's work in the laboratory, which involved piercing neural membranes with what Lehrer described as an "invisibly sharp glass pipette," was known for its painstaking precision. Lehrer's visit, however, had been occasioned not by Markram's incremental contributions to the field--it's not easy to sell a colorful profile on the basis of such publications as "The neural code between neocortical pyramidal neurons depends on neurotransmitter release probability"--but by Markram's pivot, in the early two-thousands, to brain simulation. Neuroscience, Markram declaimed to Lehrer, had reached an impasse. Researchers had generated an enormous wealth of fine-grained data, but the marginal returns had begun to diminish.