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Europe spent €600 million to recreate the human brain in a computer. How did it go?

The Human Brain Project wraps up in September after a decade. Nature examines its achievements and its troubled past.
  1. Miryam Naddaf
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A 3D-Polarized Light Image is a computing-intensive method to map the brain’s fibre architecture in microscopic resolution.

Digital reconstruction of a circuit of neurons from the temporal lobe of a human brain. Credit: Nicolas Antille

It took 10 years, around 500 scientists and some €600 million, and now the Human Brain Project — one of the biggest research endeavours ever funded by the European Union — is coming to an end. Its audacious goal was to understand the human brain by modelling it in a computer.

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Nature 620, 718-720 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02600-x

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 22 August 2023: An earlier version of this News feature gave the wrong credits for the image of the digital reconstruction of a neuronal circuit and the polarized-light image of the brain.

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