I mean, wow:
Before anyone liberates mind from body, we will need a precise blueprint of the brain. Welcome the Blue Brain project, a joint venture of IBM and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, which is attempting to reverse engineer the mammalian brain. Using an advanced supercomputer, the Blue Brain neuroscientists have thus far been able to replicate a single neocortical column of a rat brain using tens of thousands of computer chips acting as neurons. The project’s ultimate goal is to simulate the physiology of a human brain as nearly as possible. That may seem a quixotic goal, given that our brains have some 100 billion cells. Henry Markham, director of Blue Brain, warns that it will take computers vastly more powerful than those we have now to recreate a complete human brain.