In 2003, the Human Genome Project finished a monumental scientific achievement:
the first complete human genome map.
A couple of decades later, and you can get a genetic test done
by spitting in a tube and paying a couple of hundred dollars.
But that's not quite what I'm here to talk about.
This is CUBRIC, one of the most advanced brain imaging centres in Europe,
and here they’re not scanning genomes: they’re scanning connectomes.
The 'connectome' is a phrase that was coined several years ago
and it's to really encapsulate the idea of
mapping all the connections in the brain, in one go.
Those connections are formed by what we call the white matter in the brain.
So we know the brain has grey matter,
it also has white matter,
and these form these wires.
We're also really interested in what we call the microstructure,
being able to differentiate between the size and shapes of cells
that may be only a thousand of a millimetre across.
What this scanner will enable us to do
is to get information about differences across the whole brain
in a way that would only previously be possible post-mortem.
Now, I’d be getting a scan myself, but alas,
I have a bit too much metal in my body.
Don't worry about me or the camera getting sucked into this, though,
this is just the simulator that they train on.
There's no actual magnets in there.
The real scanner is over there.
This MRI scanner, the magnetic field gradient allows you
to be sensitive to the motion of water molecules
over a distance of about a thousandth of a millimetre.
To map somebody's complete connectome,
first we have to acquire the raw data,
then we have to fit it to mathematical models,
then we have to reconstruct those pathways.
And so we rapidly expand from a few hundreds of megabytes
up to tens of gigabytes.
All the hopeful science fiction fans out there shouldn’t get too excited:
in the same way as copying someone’s genome doesn't let you make an actual copy of them,
just a baby that’s an identical twin and that doesn't know anything,
scanning a connectome doesn’t mean that you can suddenly upload someone into a computer.
Scanners like this generate road maps, not satellite photos.
Heck of a road map, though.
I think we're a long way from being able
to identify differences in personality at the present time,
but that's not to say we won't be able to do it in the future.
Generally, people are connected in the same ways,
but it's subtle differences in the shapes of the tracks
that does seem to be highly reproducible.
If we scan 300 people, and then scan one of those people just one more time,
you can easily identify them out of that 300 people.
Essentially, any neurological or psychiatric disease that you can think of,
they're all symptoms of malfunction of the brain.
And we know that function of the brain relies on information transfer
from one region to another.
We can say things such as "there's something different with the integrity of the white matter".
Potentially, if you can name a neurological or psychiatric disease,
the information that we get from this scanner
is going to be a boon and give us major new insights.
And if we could bring the cost of the technology down,
you could go in for your connectome scan,
and have the personalised treatment tailored to your specific connectomic deficit.
Right now connectome scans are cumbersome and expensive,
and they take a long time to process and visualise.
But that was true of genome scans just 20 years ago.
In a decade or two, connectome research might unlock just as many benefits for the world.
Thank you very much to everyone at CUBRIC, at Cardiff University.
If you want to know more, they have a YouTube channel you can check out,
or there's a link in the description.