In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black
boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM
microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the
processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It
contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on,
the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air
conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has
been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The
behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events
unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that
has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole
Polytechnique FŽdŽrale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue
Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one
that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts
about the brain and just worked from there."

Before the Blue Brain project launched, Markram had likened it to the
Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others
dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of
2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism.

Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant
waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they
argued it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent
computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue
Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But
Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain
because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how
something works is to try to build it from scratch."

The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase
of the projectÑ"the feasibility phase"Ñis coming to a close. The skeptics,
for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the
Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which
is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with
about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built
and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain
scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be
able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it
will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes
selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say
everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his
face.

Henry Markram is tall and slim. He wears jeans and tailored shirts. He