Ed Boyden

Neuroscientist and neuroengineer at MIT, where he leads a group spanning the Media Lab and the McGovern Institute and builds tools to map and control the brain. Boyden is a co-inventor of optogenetics — the technique of inserting light-sensitive proteins into neurons so that specific brain circuits can be switched on or off with light — and the inventor of expansion microscopy, which images fine biological structure by physically swelling preserved tissue rather than improving the lens. He started college at fourteen, trained across chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, and neuroscience, and won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences in 2016. He has co-founded Cognito Therapeutics to translate his lab’s discoveries into treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Boyden’s recurring theme is that neuroscience is held back less by ambition than by ignorance: the field cannot yet describe, in enough detail, the wiring that produces a single emotion or decision, which is why brain-disease treatments remain blunt. His response is to build instruments — maps and controls — and to mine ignored old literature and adjacent disciplines for the components other people overlooked. He describes his own idea-generation method, the ‘tiling tree’, as an exhaustive combinatorial search over every physical means of solving a problem.

Core positions

We know far less about the brain than the popular science literature suggests, and the route to curing brain disease runs through defining conditions by their underlying circuitry rather than their symptoms. Consciousness is currently undetectable — there is no ‘consciousness meter’ and no way to create it from scratch — so whether a brain emulation, or even the biological original, is conscious remains genuinely unknowable; the Turing test is not enough. The most consequential ideas often fail peer review precisely because they are novel or cross-disciplinary, so funding should evaluate the logic of a proposal rather than its surface plausibility, allocate money dynamically as results arrive, and actively hunt for discoveries hiding in old or unfashionable literature. Neurotechnology’s ethical questions should be confronted proactively, on the model of the 1975 Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, before they become headlines.

In the wiki

• Ed Boyden on Minding your Brain — Conversations with Tyler, Ep. 64: optogenetics, expansion microscopy, brain mapping and emulation, the unsolved problem of consciousness, neuroethics, and how to fund pioneering science