Can the Brain's Structure Reveal its Function? - Jeff Lichtman

Glassman Lecture
Jeff Lichtman, Harvard University

Introducer: Ellen Lumpkin, Associate Professor of Somatosensory Biology (in Dermatology) and of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, Columbia University

Lecture Abstract:

The brain’s structure is more complicated than that of any other known biological tissue. As a result, much of the nervous system’s fine details, such as the vast neuronal circuits that connect nerve cells together at synapses are largely unexplored. Dr. Lichtman and his colleagues, with the help of many collaborators, have developed automated methods to both generate and analyze digital datasets that reveal all the neuronal wiring and many subcellular details of brain tissue. They use a novel means of cutting brains into very thin slices and a new electron microscope that acquires images of the brain at unprecedented speed and resolution so that in a volume of brain, every synaptic connection between nerve cells is visible. These acquired data sets are very large: a cubic millimeter of brain requires acquiring more than 2 million gigabytes of image data. The brain reconstructions coming out of this work reveal networks that are even more complicated than we imagined. In their view, this new approach, which they have dubbed “connectomics,” shows promise to be sure, but many challenges remain. Most serious of these, may be a fundamental limit to what our human brains can understand.

Jeff W. Lichtman is Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Ramón y Cajal Professor of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Lichtman is a developmental neurobiologist interested in the way in which experience alters nervous system organization in long lasting ways. He has participated in the development of a number of methods that describe neural connectivity at the level of individual synapses (connectomics) using fluorescence (e.g., Brainbow) and electron microscopical methods (e.g., ATUM). Dr. Lichtman graduated from Bowdoin College with a degree in Biology and from Washington University School of Medicine in 1980 with a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and a M.D. After postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, he joined the faculty of Washington University and remained there for twenty years before moving to his present position at Harvard in 2004. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.


About the Glassman Lecture

The Glassman Lecture is held in honor of the late Harold N. Glassman who left a generous bequest to the MBL which resulted in the establishment of the Harold N. Glassman fund, the income from which is used to support an annual Friday Evening Lecture on an important topic in biological research.