28-Aug-2019 — Lucid dreams used to be associated with the altered mental state ... Ray Kurzweil is a proponent of lucid dreaming, describing it as a way ...
Here is a photo of Swiss watch boss Christoph Grainger-Herr appearing in holographic form
When
Swiss watch boss, Christoph Grainger-Herr, was unable to fly to a
global trade show in China because of Covid-19 restrictions, he decided
to beam in Star Trek-style instead.
Mr
Grainger-Herr, the chief executive of luxury brand IWC, had been due to
travel to the Watches and Wonders event in Shanghai back in April.
When
that became impossible, instead, he decided to joined the show as a
life-size, 3D hologram. Appearing in 4K resolution, he was able to talk
to, and see and hear the people who were physically attending the event.
"We
beamed him from his office in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, to the event
in Shanghai," says David Nussbaum, the boss of US holograms firm Portl.
"He
did his thing, chatted to other executives, and even unveiled a new
watch, all in real time. And then we beamed him out again!"
Image source, Portl
Image caption,
David Nussbaum, right, showing how the Portl system works, with his hologram, left
With
the coronavirus pandemic having put a stop to much global travel since
March 2020, it has fuelled a growing interest in the use of holograms -
3D light projections of a person - as a more life-like, more immersive,
more sensory alternative to video calls.
Los-Angeles-based
Portl is one of the firms at the forefront of the technology, and Mr
Nussbaum says "we can't make our portals fast enough".
Its
portals are eight feet (2.5m) tall, glass-fronted, computerised boxes.
Inside the booths a life-size hologram of a person appears.
Image source, Getty Images
Image caption,
Beam me up Scotty? Actor George Takei relives his teleportation days in Star Trek
The
portals have built-in speakers, so that the hologram's 'voice' can be
heard. They also include cameras and microphones so that the user of the
hologram can see and hear the people in front of his, or her,
projection.
Where
the person is actually physically standing - and that can be on the
other side of the world from the portal machine - he or she just needs a
camera, a plain backdrop, and another set of speakers and microphones.
Portl's
app-controlled software system then connects the person via the
internet to wherever the portal or portals are - and you can connect to
as many as you like.
New Tech Economy is a series exploring how technological innovation is set to shape the new emerging economic landscape.
"There
is almost no latency [delay]," says Mr Nussbaum. "And were it not for
the sheet of glass in front of the hologram you'd think the person was
actually [standing] there. In fact, if there is no light on the glass so
that you cannot see it reflecting, then you do think the person is
actually there."
The Portl system is aimed at business customers, and is currently also being used by other firms such as Netflix and T-Mobile.
The
portals cost from $60,000 (£45,000) each, so they are certainly
expensive, although the company says they can be rented for considerably
less.
"In a few years time, this is going to become a regular way of communicating between offices," adds Mr Nussbaum.
At
Microsoft, its hologram communication technology is based around a
headset called HoloLens 2. At $3,500 per unit they are considerably
cheaper than Portl's system, but the 3D holograms are not lifelike.
Image source, Chris Hornbecker
Image caption,
Microsoft's hologram system requires the users to wear headsets
Instead,
when two or more headset wearers call each other, their holograms are
projected in front of each of them as somewhat cartoon-like avatars,
that appear to be standing in the same room.
"It
would appear that they are in the same physical space, and they could
walk around a virtual table and collaborate on things," said Greg
Sullivan, director of mixed reality at Microsoft.
Also aimed at business customers, German engineering group Thyssenkrupp is one firm putting the technology to practical use.
One
of the world's largest manufacturers of lifts or elevators, it used to
have to fly its technicians around the world to make any necessary
repairs. Now these employees can instead use HoloLens 2 headset to
connect in holographic form with a local technician, guiding him or her
though the work that needs doing.
Meanwhile, Japan Airlines is using the headsets to help train engine mechanics and plane crews.
Other
hologram firms are more focused on the consumer market, such
Diego-based Ikin. Next year it is launching a device that you clipas San to
your mobile phone, and it will project into the air a transparent 3D
hologram of the person you have having a video call with.
Image source, Ikin
Image caption,
Ikin's RYZ product will allow everyone with as smart phone to switch from video to hologram calls
Gordon
Wetzstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering and
computer science at Stanford University, says that holograms are a "more
effective way" of communicating than video conferencing.
"[With holograms] you can create eye contact. You can read subtle cues like who's looking at whom, " he says.
Yet,
he cautions that problems may occur in the future if these holographic
images become so real that distinguishing them from an actual person
will become impossible.
"If
you can create digital or synthetic experiences that get closer and
closer to how you perceive reality, you're more vulnerable to being
manipulated," says Mr Wetzstein.
Back
at Portl, one of the firm's earliest investors was Tim Draper, who was
also an early backer of both Skype and Tesla. Portl's Mr Nussbaum says
he is confident that hologram technology is going to replace standard
video screens in video conferencing in "five years".
He
also predicts that it will see off video information screens. "We'll
replace every single digital display kiosk in every mall, in every
lobby, in no time. This will be the new way that businesses will want to
present their content whether live or recorded."
MY FOOLISH MIND WANDERING ON POSSBILITIESOF VARIOUS THINGS:-
GOOGLE AND THE MODERN FACILITIES LIKE BLOGS HAS ELEVATED ME FROM THE 1950'S DIFFICULTIES TO EXPRESS MY SUCH THOUGHTS FREELY IN 1950 WHEN THOUGHTS OF TRAINS ON ELEVATED RAILS SUCH AS MAGNETIC ELEVATION CAME TO MY MIND AS A SMALL CHILD AND I TRIED TO DISCUSS IT WITH MY LATE ELDER BROTHER HE COULD NOT UNDERSTAND MY THOUGHTS AT ALL, HE ASKED ME- TRAINS? RUNNING ABOVE TRACKS?! HE PUT HIS HAND ON HIS HEAD IN DISBELIEF .THOSE DAYS TRAINS MEANS ONLY STEAM TRAINS
SO- todays my foolish thoughts ON META 2nd part
teletransportation
i think it can be called e travel or e movement
the original human cannot be e transported
only his bionic personality can be transported because original human is not only body;mind; thoughts ;and life prescence,or i call it soul while the teleprescence will be the double of the original in every way ;except his thoughts,his ego,his personality,his body and his soul thus teleprescence of a person can be tele-transported/e moved to another place by electronic?;internet;or the successor of present day internet which will be extremely powerful
what will the bionic prescence/bionic man ; do in another near/or /far place?
since it is connected with the original body in everyway including brain thought process of the original --the bionic man teletransported to a different place can be controlled by the real person through thoughts and actions
just for understanding a bionic ... from google but the advanced bionic man will look same as a real human;and it will be difficult to differentiate between the two;except of course humans can differentiate between them using detectors of life force versus electronic life force now:-
to connect a human brain to a bionic brain needs a lot more technological improvements to tele transport such thoughts over a distance needs much more than what we got now
what all a bionic man do under your control ? everything you do except;to have foolish thoughts about future as i am doing now next thought suddenly came to me-can a robot be made a bionic man-yes i think it is possible -it will be done what all the types of humans whom you meet on a tsreet when you go out for a walk?
MANY MANY TYPES OF HUMANS DEPENDING ON THE YEAR I AM NOW VISUALISING A HUMAN HAND IN HAND WITH AN INTELLIGENT ROBOT AND A BIONICPRESCENCE OF HIMSELF AS SECURITY PERSONNEL GOING DOWN THE ROAD ;all may look same as the human or different faces if the human decides them to have different faces and bodies
it is very exciting for me to do such thoughts now;especially when locked in due to pandemic
Elon Musk, pictured at a SpaceX event in 2019,
counts the neuroscience startup Neuralink as one of his many
future-forward endeavors.
Yichuan Cao/NurPhoto/Getty Images
At a Friday event, Elon Musk revealed more details about
his mysterious neuroscience company Neuralink and its plans to connect
computers to human brains. While the development of this
futuristic-sounding tech is still in its early stages, the presentation
was expected to demonstrate the second version of a small, robotic device that inserts tiny electrode threads through the skull and into the brain. Musk said ahead of the event he would “show neurons firing in real-time. The matrix in the matrix.”
And he did just that. At the event, Musk showed off
several pigs that had prototypes of the neural links implanted in their
head, and machinery that was tracking those pigs’ brain activity in real
time. The billionaire also announced the Food and Drug Administration
had awarded the company a breakthrough device authorization, which can help expedite research on a medical device.
Like building underground car tunnels and sending private rockets to Mars,
this Musk-backed endeavor is incredibly ambitious, but Neuralink builds
on years of research into brain-machine interfaces. A brain-machine
interface is technology that allows for a device, like a computer, to
interact and communicate with a brain. Neuralink, in particular, aims to
build an incredibly powerful brain-machine interface, a device with the
power to handle lots of data, that can be inserted in a relatively
simple surgery. Its short-term goal is to build a device that can help
people with specific health conditions.
The actual status of Neuralink’s research has been somewhat murky, and Friday’s big announcement happened as ex-employees complain of internal chaos at the company. Musk has already said the project allowed a monkey to control a computer device with its mind, and as the New York Times reported in 2019,
Neuralink had demonstrated a system with 1,500 electrodes connected to a
lab rat. Since then, Musk has hinted at the company’s progress (at times on Twitter), though those involved have generally been close-lipped about the status of the research.
Musk opened Friday’s event by emphasizing the wide
variety of spinal and neurological conditions — including seizures,
paralysis, brain damage, and depression — that Neuralink technology
could help treat.
“These can all be solved with an implantable neural
link,” said Musk. “The neurons are like wiring, and you kind of need an
electronic thing to solve an electronic problem.”
But it’s worth highlighting that Musk wants Neuralink to
do far more than treat specific health conditions. He sees the
technology as an opportunity to build a widely available brain-computer
interface for consumers, which he thinks could help humans keep pace
with increasingly powerful artificial intelligence.
So while modest, Neuralink’s research already foreshadows
how this technology could one day change life as we know it. At the
same time, it’s a reminder that the potential, eventual merging of
humans with computers is destined to introduce a wide range of ethical
and social questions that we should probably start thinking about now.
Neuralink wants to link your brain with computers, but that will take a while
Founded in 2016,
Neuralink is a neuroscience technology company focused on building
systems with super-thin threads that carry electrodes. When implanted
into a brain, these threads would form a high-capacity channel for a
computer to communicate with the brain, a system supposed to be much
more powerful than the existing brain-machine interfaces being
researched.
One
major barrier to inserting these incredibly tiny wires, which are
thinner than a strand of human hair, is actually getting them past the
skull and into the brain.
That’s why Neuralink is also developing an
incredibly small robot that connects the electrode to humans through
surgery that’s about as intensive as a Lasik eye procedure. On Friday,
Musk outlined how the company hopes to do the procedure without general
anesthesia in a single-day hospital stay. That’s the goal at least, and
would represent a huge leap forward from previous brain-machine
interfaces, which have required more invasive surgeries.
“The brain itself uses certain frequencies and certain
kinds of electrical thresholding to communicate with itself,” Williams
explained. “Your brain is a series of circuits that kind of
intercommunicate and communicate between themselves.”
A screenshot of the demo shows how a prototype can track the neural spikes of a pig that’s had the device implanted.
Screenshot from YouTube
Essentially, a brain-machine interface can use the electricity the brain already uses to function along with a series of electrodes to connect the brain with a machine. Neuralink cites previous examples
in which humans have used electrodes to control cursors and robotic
limbs with their minds as the basis for its system. But what’s novel
about Neuralink’s plan is making the process of connecting a device with
the brain minimal, while also massively increasing the number of
electrodes engaged. The company wants to make brain-machine interfaces
not only easier to install but also more powerful.
The Neuralink surgical robot, revealed on Friday, is supposed to manipulate and insert the tiny threads into the brain.
Woke Studios
i think surgical way to connect looks primitive .best will be to accenuate brain waves produced naturally using THE NEXT technology -i will have to think what it can be now--and recieve it out side brain as electronic waves ;or may be radio waves?
As the focus of Friday’s event, Musk showed what the
second generation of that robot will look like: a large white structure
with five degrees of freedom.
“The robot is a super complicated, highly-precise machine
which is able to both capture your brain and then with almost a sewing
machine-like, micro-precise needle and thread, place the neural threads
in the exact right location based on the surgeon decisions around what
the safe locations are for the threads to be inserted,” Afshin Mehin, a
designer and founder of the firm Woke, which worked on the robot’s outer
device that holds the needle, told Recode.
The
machine operates at a very small scale, and Neuralink hopes to expand
its capabilities. For instance, the current robot has a 150 micrometer
gripper, and an even tinier needle — less than 40 micrometers — which
can “grasp the implant’s threads then precisely insert each into the
cortex while avoiding visible vasculature,” according to Neuralink
robotics director Ian O’Hara. He added in an emailed statement that,
while the robot currently handles only the insertion of the threads,
Neuralink is working to expand the robot’s role in surgery to increase
the number of patients it can help and make the procedure shorter.
Musk said that, in the past year, Neuralink simplified
its plans for a wearable device that connects to the threads implanted
in the user’s brain. While the first generation of this device would
have been installed behind a person’s ear, the newest version is a
small, coin-size device that would sit under the top of their skull.
“It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull with tiny wires,” explained Musk, who compared the device to a smart watch.
The research is still in early stages and, as it
advances, will likely require focusing on how the technology can help
people with specific, severe health conditions first, according to Stanford neurosurgery professor Maheen Adamson.
While the medical applications of such technology could be
wide-ranging, moving it from its current, nascent state will require the
close oversight of the Food and Drug Administration, which would not comment specifically on Neuralink.
22-Dec-1997 — When the delta brainwave frequencies increase into the frequency of theta brainwaves, active dreaming takes place and often becomes more ..
CIRCUITS in the brain can pick up the senses
just like a living FM radio, scientists in Israel claim. They think that
we can feel textures because the brain tirelessly monitors the changing
frequencies of neurons.
According to the conventional “passive” model of the brain, sensory
information such as touch passes as electrical pulses from nerve endings
in the skin to the brain stem. Pulses then travel to the thalamus, a
pea-shaped structure just above, and end up in a processing centre in
the cortex.
Now Ehud Ahissar of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot and
his colleagues say that’s not the whole story. Seven years ago, they
found that a monkey’s cortex has certain neurons that continuously
oscillate. “It was not at all clear what their role might be,” says
Ahissar.
His team decided to study rats to see if these oscillations have a
role in sensory perception. Rats find out about objects around them by
touching them with quivering whiskers.
The researchers monitored neurons in the cortex that receive
information from whiskers. They found that even when the rats were not
moving their whiskers or touching anything, a tenth of the neurons had
an intrinsic frequency of about 10 hertz. When the whiskers touch an
object, the frequency of the neuron oscillation alters.
This means that the brain interprets the signals like an FM
radio, says Ahissar in the current issue of Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (vol 94, p 11633). Frequency modulation (FM)
transmitters send out a “carrier” radio wave at the channel frequency.
Sounds are encoded on this wave as alterations in frequency.
So in rats’ brains, the natural frequency of neurons in the cortex
can be compared to the frequency of the FM channel, while information
about the object a rat is touching is encoded like the sound. Ahissar
speculates that rather than simply relaying pulses to the cortex,
neurons in the thalamus act as an FM receiver by interpreting the
frequency changes, from which rats perceive texture.
The same may be true for humans. Our fingertips have two main types
of receptors, and Ahissar suspects that while one sends pulses to the
brain in the conventional way, the other works like the FM system. “They
are probably decoded in parallel in the human brain,” says Ahissar.
“Together they provide the whole picture.”
yes this is better than robot suing up each neuron of each human being to get bionic effect
this is he way -not robot suturing up neurons 😀 =============================================
or 2--the below article shows another method to tie up nerves without thread and needle
Levi-Montalcini’s experiments in the 1940s revealed
that our brain and spinal cord manage to make connections all over our
body because our embryonic bodies become densely filled with an excess
of nerve cells—about a twofold excess, scientists now estimate. Those
nerve cells that make accurate connections are afforded the privilege of
survival. The rest die. The process seems remarkably inefficient, but
it is remarkably robust:
Nerve Growth Factor was the first
of several growth factors discovered by scientists, and these factors
are now known to have critical roles in nervous system wiring and also
in cancer
This is your last free article this month. Learn More.
On a cold, dry Tuesday in December,
1940, Rita Levi-Montalcini rode a train from the station near her home
in Turin, Italy, for 80 miles to Milan to buy a microscope. Milan had
not seen bombings for months. On her return to the Turin train station,
two police officers stopped her and demanded to see inside the
cake-sized box that she was carrying. With wartime food rationing,
panettone cakes were only available illegally. The officers found her
new microscope instead. They let her go. Just a week after her trip,
British bombers hit Milan.
Levi-Montalcini was a 31-year-old
scientist who had been working at the University of Turin. Despite her
father’s disapproval, she had trained in medicine, inspired by seeing a
nanny succumb to cancer. In 1938, the Italian dictator Mussolini banned
Jews from positions in universities. Levi-Montalcini was not raised in
the Jewish religion, but her Jewish ancestry would have been evident
from her surname. Mussolini’s ban had pushed Levi-Montalcini to leave
Italy for Belgium in 1939, where she did research using fertilized
chicken eggs as a source of material for her research topic: the
developing nervous systems of vertebrate embryos. Levi-Montalcini also
spent time with her older sister Nina, whose family was in Belgium as
well. Rita wrote home to her mother of an “infinite desire to embrace
you again,” but research at the university in Turin would have been
impossible had she returned home. Her passion for research alternated
with her frustration with challenges. When Hitler invaded Poland in
September, launching war, her worst frustrations were realized. The
“whole world was in danger,” Levi-Montalcini later wrote. In December
1939, she returned to Italy.
TAKE SHELTER:
Author Bob Goldstein traces the steps that Rita Levi-Montalcini and her
family took during WWII in Turin, Italy. As bombs fell, they fled into
the cellar beneath their apartment building. Levi-Montalcini often
brought her microscope and precious glass slides with her.Florian Jug
Levi-Montalcini
moved in with her mother, her twin sister Paola, who was an artist, and
her architect brother Gino, in her childhood home. The apartment, in
the center of Turin, was large, with 10 rooms, including a bedroom for
each family member and a common living room. Some of the rooms faced
into the apartment building’s common courtyard. There was little for
Levi-Montalcini and her family to do outside of the apartment;
Mussolini’s laws restricted Jews from most jobs and schools and
threatened to confiscate Jewish-owned property. A fascist manifesto
asserted that Jews do not belong to the Italian race, and declared,
contrary to popular sentiment in Italy, “It is time that Italians
proclaim themselves genuinely racist.” In June 1940, Mussolini joined
Hitler by declaring war on France and Great Britain, and Britain
responded with nighttime aerial bombings of Italy through summer and
fall, focused on Turin and other industrial cities. The city was dark
each night as a blackout was enforced across Italy. No lights were
permitted to be visible from homes or shops.
Levi-Montalcini
responded to the tumult by transforming her bedroom into her own
research lab. The bedroom was long and narrow, and opposite its entrance
was a window, which overlooked the courtyard. In front of the window,
she placed a table for opening eggs and a simple microscope for
operating on the embryos. Near her bed she placed the more elaborate
microscope that she carried from Milan, a new model with two eyepieces
so she could look into it with both eyes. It was equipped with a camera,
and a device with mirrors that would allow her to see both microscopic
detail and her own hand next to the microscope at the same time, so she
could trace on paper the tiny nerve cells that she viewed. The bed was
against one of the long walls, and at the opposite wall she put shelves,
on which sat a heater for melting wax, and an egg incubator that her
brother built with a thermostat and a fan. She could embed embryos in
the melted wax which, once hardened, she would cut into paper-thin
slivers, so that she could view nerve cells in the slices in the
microscope from Milan. The experiments “absorbed her completely,” she
later recalled, satisfying a childhood dream to explore unknown places,
in this case the “jungle” of the nervous system.
I sought to walk in Rita Levi-Montalcini’s footsteps to build a clearer sense of what life was like for her.
Today,
few people—even very few scientists—know what it was that
Levi-Montalcini uncovered in her bedroom lab in Turin. Textbooks cite
her courage but rarely her wartime discoveries, which are usually
credited to others. Levi-Montalcini earned a Nobel Prize for scientific
accomplishments that she made after the war. But when she died in 2012,
at age 103, she left behind only a little writing about her experiences
during the war, along with some rarely read technical articles from the
time, published in Italian and French.
I had read Levi-Montalcini’s autobiography, In Praise of Imperfection,
but it divulged little about her research during the war or about what
she experienced at the time. I found her research articles from the time
and began to translate them to English, to pore through the details of
her discoveries. In 2018, on a work trip to nearby Switzerland, I
contacted Levi-Montalcini’s closest living relative—her niece Piera
Levi-Montalcini—who agreed to meet with me and talk. I sought to walk in
Rita Levi-Montalcini’s footsteps in Italy to build a clearer sense of
what life was like for her when she was making discoveries in the midst
of a war.
As I reconstructed her experiences, her research
articles from the war revealed to me that the experiments from her
bedroom were more pivotal than I’d expected based on textbooks.
Levi-Montalcini’s wartime experiments asked something fundamental. How
do our billions of nerve cells wire up so precisely inside our bodies?
Her bedroom discoveries charted a new course for humankind’s
understanding of how our nerves connect, allowing us to walk and see and
feel.
When you were
an embryo, nerve cells shaped like long, thin wires snaked throughout
your body, connecting your brain and spinal cord to many targets—to the
muscles that each nerve cell will control, for example. Imagine your
body as a house under construction, but where the wires grow themselves
out from the central circuit box, winding through the walls, and
connecting to each outlet, appliance, and light bulb. A human body is
more complex than a house, so you’ll need to imagine a house with not
dozens of wires, but billions. How can each wire locate each target,
making accurate connections in your body—billions of accurate
connections—and all while your tiny fetal body is growing and changing
shape? Getting wires to connect to all these targets is a formidable
task. And miswiring can lead to paralysis. There are birth defects in
which babies are born permanently unable to smile, or to walk, because
certain nerve cells fail to connect to targets.
Levi-Montalcini
had a lifelong obsession with understanding how our nervous system
develops. And, in the summer of 1940, she had what she called her
“conversion.” She was reading an article by Viktor Hamburger, a German
working in the United States exploring how nerve cells develop. She read
the article as she sat on the floor of an open train car moving slowly
through the countryside, enjoying a backdrop of yellowing corn plants
and bright red poppies.
Hamburger’s article described his
experiments aimed at understanding how nerve cells connect accurately.
Hamburger’s goal in the experiments was to remove some targets—the
muscles that some nerve cells would wire up to the brain—to learn
whether nerve cells grow differently if deprived of targets. He did his
work in chicken eggs—nerves in chicken embryos develop much as they do
in humans, and using eggs ensured a plentiful source of material for his
experiments.
Today very few scientists know what it was that Levi-Montalcini uncovered in her bedroom lab in Turin.
Hamburger
described carefully cutting a window in an eggshell at a stage when the
chick embryo inside was only about the size and shape of a typed letter
“f,” but translucent and nearly invisible on the surface of the yolk.
Near the middle of the “f” were two bumps that would normally grow to
become wings, at least in fertilized chicken eggs that are not eaten.
Hamburger used a glass needle under a microscope to remove one bump—the
wing bud on the right side. And about five days after the operation, he
examined nine eggs to see the effect of depriving the nerve cells of
their targets. He saw that in each egg, the normal wing bud on the left
side had grown to a few millimeters long, and nerve cells had grown out
to it as expected. But on the right side, where he had removed the wing
bud, the nerve cells were missing.
Hamburger surmised that in
the absence of targets, the nerve cells had never formed. He speculated
that normally, the target muscles must somehow send a signal that can
induce other cells to become nerve cells, or perhaps cause young nerve
cells to divide, making more nerve cells. In the article he noted a long
line of earlier researchers whose experiments or observations of birth
defects—in humans or animals—revealed that the number of nerve cells
would match roughly the number of targets. Loss of a limb would result
in fewer nerve cells found nearby. And increasing the target population
would result in more nerve cells nearby. Hamburger’s interpretation
suggested a simple solution to how this match was made: Each muscle
somehow turns other cells nearby into nerve cells, guaranteeing that a
population of nerve cells would be available locally to connect to each
muscle.
Levi-Montalcini was struck by the clarity of Hamburger’s
writing. By this stage she had trained in Turin with the famous
neurobiologist Giuseppe Levi (who only coincidentally shared a surname
with her), worked in Belgian labs, and published nine scientific
articles reporting new discoveries. She had worked with chick embryos,
with mice, and with microsurgery, and she had observed detailed nerve
and muscle anatomy. She was an experienced researcher who was well
equipped to take some next steps to understand how nerve cells make
accurate connections to their targets.
After
the aerial bombings began in 1940, Levi-Montalcini could work all day
in her bedroom lab. At night, when sirens announced incoming warplanes,
Levi-Montalcini and her family would hurry out of their apartment, down a
set of stairs, and then across the courtyard to another set of stairs
that led to cellars. Levi-Montalcini would bring her microscope and
precious glass slides with her. Families would wait for hours in the
cellars and hope they would not be buried in rubble.
Levi-Montalcini
must have left the apartment frequently to buy chicken eggs for the
experiments, at times likely walking among bomb rubble. She repeated the
experiment that Hamburger had described, removing a tiny limb bud from
each chicken embryo and examining the effect on nerve cells later.
Hamburger had used a glass needle to cut out the tiny limb bud; in place
of a glass needle, Levi-Montalcini used an ordinary sewing needle that
she had sharpened. But Levi-Montalcini also decided to do something new:
To see how the embryos developed, she examined the results of the
operation each day after removing the limb bud. This required embedding
one embryo in wax each day, then slicing the wax, observing the slices
on glass slides under the microscope, and counting thousands of nerve
cells. Her patience with the experiments would allow her to see how
development proceeded little by little after removing a limb bud—like
watching a movie made from individual frames—instead of seeing only a
single moment in time as others had before her. She also used a silver
stain and a blue dye to see the nerve cells more clearly than before,
allowing her to distinguish young nerve cells from fully formed ones.
And she used a red dye that could highlight dividing cells. She recorded
counts of thousands of nerve cells nearly every day from 2 to 19 days
after removing a limb bud.
In August, 1941, Levi-Montalcini’s
mentor Giuseppe Levi joined her and began to assist with her
experiments. Levi had moved to Belgium too and had been working alone in
an empty Belgian institute for a year after the Germans invaded. He
arrived thin and pale after a difficult trip across Germany.
Levi-Montalcini’s bedroom lab became a meeting place where Levi’s
friends and former students would visit and talk about the events in the
news.
In the chicken
embryos, Levi-Montalcini saw what Hamburger had seen about five days
after the operation: There were fewer nerve cells on the side of the
embryo where the limb bud had been removed. But following this
day-by-day revealed to Levi-Montalcini something unexpected.
For
the first two days after removing a limb bud, the areas where nerve
cells would form looked surprisingly similar on both sides of the
embryo. Nerve cells did not fail to form—they were forming in the
thousands on both the normal side and the operated side. On the third
day after the operation, nerve cells continued to form: Levi-Montalcini
saw dividing cells on both sides. Young nerve cells had accumulated as
well as more fully formed ones. Only then did she begin to notice
slightly fewer of the fully formed nerve cells on the operated side.
Peering in the tiny wax slices at embryos on each successive day made
clear that nerve cells continued to form after removing a limb bud. But
then soon after forming and extending out toward targets, the nerve
cells that were deprived of targets would disappear. Only nerve cells
that contacted nearby targets, like in the skin along the back,
remained.
How were the nerve cells disappearing? In her bedroom
lab, Levi-Montalcini saw something that other scientists had not
predicted. The nerve cells deprived of targets appeared to be dying
after reaching toward targets in vain. In the areas where nerve cells
were disappearing, Levi-Montalcini could see signs of nerve cell
death—she reported abnormally “conglutinated” masses of nerve cell
fibers, and a shrunken nucleus in many of the cells. Dying nerve cells
had been described in animal embryos before by others, but what
Levi-Montalcini saw was the first sign that nerve cells would die
specifically when they lacked targets. Imagine removing a light bulb
from a house under construction, and watching as wires snaked through
the walls, reaching everywhere—but then shriveling up specifically where
they failed to find the missing bulb.
Textbooks nearly always credit what Levi-Montalcini discovered during the war to other scientists.
Levi-Montalcini
sent the results for publication in a scientific journal in
Belgium—Jewish scientists were barred from publishing in Italian
journals. In the article, published in French in 1942, she and Levi
reported the discovery: Nerve cells that were deprived of targets formed
normally, but then disappeared. Near the end of the article was a
promise to better document how exactly the cells were disappearing: “We
propose to do this in a more detailed presentation and with more
documented results.” But British bombings of Turin intensified that
fall. In hindsight, there was no guarantee that Levi-Montalcini or her
bedroom lab would have survived to fulfill her promise.
Levi-Montalcini
continued to observe her sectioned embryos, in essence replaying the
film of nerve cells disappearing but looking more closely at the details
of the disappearance. After documenting for herself what she saw, she
prepared an article in Italian for a Vatican journal, again evading the
ban on publishing in Italian journals. As the earlier article had
promised, this one was indeed packed with detail—descriptions of a
microscopic world of nerve cells in the throes of death before they
vanished near where their targets had been removed. Granules organized
in neat stripes had disappeared from the insides of dying cells, and the
shrinking nucleus of each dying cell had material that was abnormally
organized inside, surrounded at times by only “a thin and pale
cytoplasmic veil.” Levi-Montalcini described the details of death in all
sorts of nerve cells that are common to chicken or human embryos, from
nerve cells that convey to our brains what our extremities feel, to
others that allow our toes to move. The research article had 45 pages of
detail, including seven pages of photographs and drawings. If there was
some doubt left after the earlier paper that nerve cells deprived of
targets would die, this next article had settled it.
These two
articles charted a new course for understanding how our nervous system
is shaped. Cell death sculpts our nervous system: Our brain becomes
wired to our body so precisely in large part because those nerve cells
that fail to find targets simply die.
In October, 1942, the
nighttime bombings of Turin resumed after a seven-month lull. One
Thursday night, sirens started near 9 p.m. and sounded for more than
three hours, as bombs fell from British planes heading southeast to a
coastal city. The next night, the sirens started just after 10 p.m.,
sounding for more than two hours. The bombings intensified in November.
On some nights, nearly 200 planes flew over Turin, dropping hundreds of
tons of bombs. Bombs and devices to start fires hit industrial sites,
homes, theaters, and hospitals. Hundreds of Turin residents were killed.
A Turin resident described in his diary seeing in the mornings the
“astonished, amazed faces of the people who wander the streets”
surveying the damage from the night before. The strategy of hiding in
cellars was abandoned for many citizens of Turin, as they began to
evacuate the city en masse. Levi-Montalcini and her family moved to a
family farmhouse in the countryside, near the town of Asti.
The
next day, I drove to Asti, an hour away. I checked into a hotel and
walked through town past medieval churches and busy outdoor cafes. On
the following day, Gino Montalcini—a cousin of Piera’s who now owns the
farmhouse where Levi-Montalcini and her family went in 1942—took me in
his car out of the center of town, to the top of a nearby ridge where
the house sits. I met Piera, and Gino’s wife, Anna.
PICTURE OF NERVES:
Rita Levi-Montalcini took this photo of nerve cells under a microscope
she bought on a dangerous trip to Milan during the war. She also
illustrated the nerve cells. Her illustrations surround the portrait of
her at the top of this article.Rita Levi-Montalcini
Piera,
who was Rita’s frequent travel companion late in Rita’s life, bore some
resemblance to the Rita I’d seen in photos. They shared an upswept,
styled volume of white hair. Piera also shared some of the unconcerned
confidence that Levi-Montalcini had while working in a male-dominated
field. Piera was an electrical engineer. “If you just walk your own way
and you are brave enough—I mean, reckless enough— they look at you as if
you were an alien, so they stay away from you,” Piera said with a
smile. When she was choosing a career path in the 1960s, Piera visited
Rita, who at the time had a lab in Rome. She recalled Levi-Montalcini’s
thin hands, the chick embryos, and seeing one of the needles that
Levi-Montalcini used, “They appear enormous when viewed through the
microscope!”
Behind the house sat a green lawn shaded by a row
of linden trees. From the lawn I could see the town below, and the
tracks on which the trains came from Turin. Asti was not a frequent
target for bombings when Levi-Montalcini was there, but sirens announced
British warplane flyovers. A mid-July 1943 nighttime bombing in town
probably would have been visible from the house.
I walked to a
high spot on a corner of the property, and Gino Montalcini pointed along
a path toward a neighbor’s house where Levi-Montalcini stayed when the
farmhouse was filled with the extended family. Levi-Montalcini would
have walked to the farmhouse each morning along the path, past grape
vines, a few cows, goats, and sheep, and some chickens. She relocated
her microscope and the other lab equipment from Turin in front of a
window in a corner of the dining room. Here she worked through the fall
of 1943, when it became unsafe.
I asked how Levi-Montalcini maintained her focus during war. Her niece said she “kept working to survive.”
We
went inside and sat down in the dining room. We were just an arm’s
length from where Levi-Montalcini would have sat at her microscope.
Piera told us, “I think of all the things we often did together. I have
memories of the places we’ve been together, the things she would tell me
about her life. When she was traveling with me, she knew that I would
listen if she wanted to talk, and that if she didn’t feel like talking,
she just didn’t have to.” Piera smiled and recalled that Rita would tell
her, “‘You’ve always been my best travel companion.’ Because I didn’t
bother her, basically.”
I asked Piera how she thought that
Levi-Montalcini could have maintained her focus on research in the midst
of a war, studying cell death while in real danger of her own death.
She said that Levi-Montalcini “kept working to survive, to cope with
that weird life of people who didn’t exist. Because they had been erased
everywhere.”
Piera recently discovered the letters that Rita and
her sister Nina had sent home from Belgium in 1939 soon after the war
had begun, while they had waited for visas to return home. The letters
elaborate on how Rita maintained her focus on research as a war began
around her, describing the escape from despair that her research offered
as the war began. Rita wrote, “I am amazed at the complete possibility
of escaping to the present, diving into the marvelous charms of nerve
conduction.” Nina added in the margins that her younger sister Rita,
“here reading next to me … is so well … she is so animated for her
studies.”
Back home, in my
lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I searched for
any signs in Levi-Montalcini’s wartime research articles that the
experiments took place in a bedroom. As was typical in scientific
articles, the writing focused tightly on the experiments and their
results. Levi-Montalcini didn’t mention her home, or the sewing needle
that she had used for microsurgery. I could find only one cryptic clue,
in the 1942 article, that the site of the work might have been atypical.
Every other scientific article in the 1942 volume included the name of
the institute where the work was performed. “University of Brussels,
Laboratory of Embryology of the Faculty of Medicine.” “University of
Liege, Laboratory of Histology.” Levi-Montalcini’s article listed just
one word for the address, “Turin.” No institute. I wondered if
scientists reading the article in 1942 might have noticed the peculiar
omission.
Viktor Hamburger saw the 1942 article after the war
ended. Levi-Montalcini’s results confirmed to Hamburger what he had seen
earlier—that targets could affect how many nerve cells would be nearby.
But they also showed that Hamburger’s speculations about how this
worked were wrong. He invited her to come to the United States to
continue the experiments in his lab at Washington University in St.
Louis. There, Levi-Montalcini discovered that even in normal, unoperated
embryos, many nerve cells die where they lack targets—for example in
the areas where no limbs form. And the nerve cells that would die in
normal embryos could be rescued—they would survive if targets were added
nearby, confirming that even in normal development, many nerve cells
form but die because they lack targets. Hamburger was clear about his
own limited role in this work. He contributed his thoughts and his
enthusiasm for Levi-Montalcini’s results, but, as he reported later,
“the experiments and observations on the slides were done by Dr.
Levi-Montalcini.” And he accepted that the results proved him wrong. “It
was a regressive process rather than a progressive process as I had
guessed, wrongly,” he reported in an interview. Levi-Montalcini recalled
later what she called one of Hamburger’s finest traits, his
“whole-hearted joy over fortunate turns in a colleague’s or pupil’s
research.”
In the warm evenings of summer 1948, Levi-Montalcini would
share dinner with Hamburger and his aged father, and then sit at a table
under the porch in St. Louis as they wrote an article describing the
results. Levi-Montalcini had published more than 20 research articles by
this time, but none in English. That summer, she wrote of her pleasure
of re-experiencing the clear thinking in Hamburger’s writing years
earlier. Just a mile from where they met in the evenings of summer,
1948, Levi-Montalcini now has a star on the sidewalk in the St. Louis
Walk of Fame, along with Chuck Berry, Stan Musial, Maya Angelou, and
others.
Levi-Montalcini’s experiments in the 1940s revealed
that our brain and spinal cord manage to make connections all over our
body because our embryonic bodies become densely filled with an excess
of nerve cells—about a twofold excess, scientists now estimate. Those
nerve cells that make accurate connections are afforded the privilege of
survival. The rest die. The process seems remarkably inefficient, but
it is remarkably robust: Birth defects where connections are not made
are rare. Even if you were born with an extra body part, it would almost
certainly become wired up to your brain. Indeed, people born with an
extra finger or toe can generally attest to this: Their brains can move
the extra part, and feel using it. And vertebrate animals of all
different sizes and shapes no doubt have nervous systems that fit their
bodies in large part because of this process. Levi-Montalcini’s bedroom
discoveries were the turning point in humankind’s understanding that our
nervous system is minutely shaped by death. Cell death is not alone in
shaping the nervous system—later scientists discovered that other
processes make important contributions as well. And cell death has more
complex roles than had been revealed by the end of the 1940s. But
Levi-Montalcini’s experiments established a fundamental finding about
how our nervous system is shaped.
Nearly
every textbook today on the development of the nervous system has a
chapter on cell death’s prominent role in wiring our bodies. Some of
them note Levi-Montalcini’s courage for doing experiments in a homemade
lab during the war. What she discovered in the war, though, is today
nearly always credited to other scientists. One book credits a scientist
working in the 1930s, who did not report on cell death at all. Others
credit Hamburger. Some cite Levi-Montalcini only for guessing that nerve
cells lacking targets might die, crediting Hamburger and
Levi-Montalcini working together in 1949 to first show it
definitively—years after Levi-Montalcini had shown it in the articles
she wrote from her bedroom lab. It perhaps did not help that Hamburger
and Levi-Montalcini themselves had muddied the history of the
discoveries over the years. They each lived beyond their 100th
birthdays, and both made statements about their roles at times,
particularly late in their lives, that did not precisely match the
published record.
I contacted scientists who wrote the textbooks to ensure I had my facts straight. Dale Purves, author of the book Body and Brain, told me that he had never read Levi-Montalcini’s wartime research articles. Dan Sanes, who co-wrote the textbook Development of the Nervous System,
said the same. Lynne Bianchi, Bill Harris, David Price—none of the
textbook writers I reached had read the articles. I find it hard to
place blame, really. English has become the international language of
science in recent decades, even at international conferences, and the
wartime articles were published in Italian and French. My translations
benefitted from Google Translate, which improved after the textbooks
were first written. And textbooks cover a lot of ground—thousands of
research papers. “You know there’s only so many hours,” Price explained,
adding an invitation to correct the record. “I’d love to get it right
in my head. And then in the book.”
I offered to share the
translations of Levi-Montalcini’s wartime papers with the writers. And
based on the translations, it was clear to me that among a muddied
record was a detailed historical article by another scientist, Maxwell
Cowan, who had read each of the papers and who had the facts straight. I
shared that article as well. Some of the writers reached back to say
they were already drafting corrections for the next edition of their
textbook. Their responses reminded me of Hamburger’s enthusiasm about
Levi-Montalcini disproving his own hypotheses. When new facts came to
light, he accepted them. Purves, who knew Hamburger, said about
Levi-Montalcini’s wartime science, “These were remarkable times, and she
was a remarkably resilient person.”
From the time Levi-Montalcini
arrived at Washington University, she continued to build on her
research during the war: how target tissues like muscles talk to nerve
cells, enabling the survival of only those nerve cells that find
targets. That led to her co-discovery with Stanley Cohen of Nerve Growth
Factor—a molecule that nerve cells take up from target tissues and that
enables the nerve cells to survive. Nerve Growth Factor was the first
of several growth factors discovered by scientists, and these factors
are now known to have critical roles in nervous system wiring and also
in cancer. In 1986, Levi-Montalcini and Cohen were awarded the Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of growth factors.
Throughout
her life, Levi-Montalcini denied that she had experienced
discrimination as a woman in science. Her colleagues, though, recall her
fiercely defending her own role in her discoveries. After the Nobel
Prize, she established a foundation to provide scholarships to African
women, and she was made a Senator for Life in the Italian Parliament in
2001. Fifty years after her 1942 article reporting experiments from the
bedroom in Turin, she reflected on how she managed to focus on her
research in the midst of a war, “when all the values I cherished were
being crushed.” She wrote, “The answer may be found in the well-known
refusal of human beings to accept reality at its face value, whether it
be the fate of an individual, of a country, or of the whole of human
society. Without this built-in defense mechanism, life would be
unbearable.”
Bob Goldstein heads a biology research lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lead collage: Tasnuva Elahi; photo by AP Images; tracings of nerve cells by Rita Levi-Montalcini, made in her home lab.
Image source, Sawyer Cheng
Image source, Portl
Image source, Getty Images
Image source, Chris Hornbecker
Image source, Ikin
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67310328/GettyImages_1175368064.0.jpg)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19433750/open_sourced_story_logo.png){kind=logo}
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21825907/Screen_Shot_2020_08_28_at_7.19.18_PM.png)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/21825855/the_prototype_robot_being_tested_in_the_lab.jpg)
