Microsoft’s other mogul

“THE brain is quite unlike a computer. Instead of memory and a few calculating elements, evolution designed every little bit of it to be hideously complex,” says Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and main benefactor of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. “And then when you start studying every little bit of it, you find there’s even additional complexity. Understanding how the brain works is a fiendishly challenging problem.”

It is a problem that Mr Allen is doing his best to solve. For the past decade, his institute, based in Seattle, has been mapping the grey matter of mice, primates and humans on an industrial scale. Thin slices of tissue are analysed to pinpoint the three-dimensional locations in the brain where individual genes—20,000 in mice alone—have a biological effect. Laboratory robots and automated cameras feed this cellular-level data into vast databases that in turn populate online multimedia brain “atlases”, freely accessible to all.