The human brain is the most sophisticated and complex organ in the universe. We know very little about him. This is what Professor Rafael Yuste, who has been in the United States for 25 years and now leads one of the most ambitious scientific projects of this decade: drawing an exhaustive map of the brain that allows unraveling its secrets and curing many mental illnesses:
"We have in mind patients who have paralysis, schizophrenia, epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease, for example." According to Professor Yuste there is not much difference between the human brain and that of a fly or a worm. However, the task is difficult. The human brain has 100 billion neurons and each neuron 10.000 connections. The aspiration of scientists is at least to know a part of that activity.
This project has been compared for its magnitude with the map of the human genome that revolutionized science.
In the creation of this map of the brain, about a hundred scientists will participate during the next 15 years. Obama himself presented it as one of the objectives of his mandate in the speech on the state of the union. For Rafael Yuste it was quite a surprise because he heard from Obama's own mouth the words he had written.
Yuste has the full backing of the Obama administration for a project that will start with a budget of 2.300 billion euros and that opens a path of hope for more than 1.000 million people affected by mental illness in the world.