The Grand Quest To Simulate Life - EP 57 Ed Boyden

**Ed Boyden** (0:00)
Suppose you did simulate a brain, does it have subjective experiences? Would it be conscious? Of course, the core issue in some ways is that we can't really measure consciousness. Like even now, you don't know for sure if I'm conscious, right? There's no meter you aim at my head and, aha, you have three out of four or whatever units of consciousness right now. Yeah, so in the long run, we're starting to wonder, is there a way to measure consciousness? And a couple of ideas. One is that if you have a simulation of a brain, right now in neuroscience, we mostly focus on behavior outwardly manifested in the end movements. I move my mouth to speak, I walk out the door, there's these observables that are governed. But if I'm sitting here daydreaming all morning and I never tell anybody about it, I never change my behavior based on that, there's no way to know that that happened. So one of my deep hopes is that if we have the simulation of the brain, we can look under the hood, and if there's some pattern of activity that doesn't really link to behavior in any way, but we can watch it and simulate it and probe at it, we can ask ourselves what kind of information processing is happening in that circuit.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:20)
Ed Boyden.

**Ed Boyden** (1:21)
Hi, how are you?

**Ashlee Vance** (1:22)
I'm good, how are you?

**Ed Boyden** (1:23)
Good, good.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:23)
Good.

**Ed Boyden** (1:24)
Welcome.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:24)
Thank you. I've wanted to talk to you for so many years. I feel like I run around the world talking to all these interesting people, and very often, someone, the phrase that comes out of their mouth is, I worked in the Ed Boyden lab for some of the most interesting people I run into. And this seems to happen the most with you and George Churches.

**Ed Boyden** (1:48)
Oh, wow, interesting.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:50)
Yeah, you've got this litany of fascinating students, and then obviously, I followed your work.

**Ed Boyden** (1:56)
Oh, great.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:58)
For people who don't know your research and your work, I'll just frame it a little bit, and then please correct me if I get anything wrong. But yeah, I'm so pleased to be a legendary scientist, researcher. You've done such incredible work, especially around the brain, and how we get to know about the brain, or what we know about the brain. We are at the McGovern Brain Institute. You're also a professor at MIT, and then you are affiliated with or have co-founded numerous startups. Is that fair so far?

**Ed Boyden** (2:32)
Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:33)
Anything I missed?

**Ed Boyden** (2:34)
No, sounds good.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:35)
Okay. And this is funny. Pat McGovern, he was my first boss.

**Ed Boyden** (2:40)
Oh, wow. Swarovski.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:42)
I worked at IDG back in the day as a cub reporter.

**Ed Boyden** (2:46)
So cool.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:46)
Yeah. Did you meet Pat?

**Ed Boyden** (2:48)
I did. Yeah. Pat and Laurie were very involved. I met them many times in the early days, and of course, Pat sadly passed away. But Laurie still comes to the meetings.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:58)
Yeah. So I worked at IDG, the publishing side of what he did, I guess how he made his money really. And every Christmas, Pat would come by, and hand you your Christmas bonus in person, to like all, I don't know how many thousands of employees. Incredible. Yeah, he would travel the whole world, and then it was obviously a very nice gesture. It got slightly comical at times, because somebody would brief him about who he was about to meet. And I was on the wrong end one time when he crossed wires. He confused two of us, and he would kind of recount your achievements for the year, and I just had to nod as he was talking about somebody else.

**Ed Boyden** (3:43)
Wow. Well, it's so great that he did that. I mean, it's all about the people, Dan, and I think that's really awesome that he did that.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:49)
It is. Obviously, I'm still talking about it, so it leaves an impression. Yeah.

**Ed Boyden** (3:54)
That's great.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:55)
Okay. Well, there's a million things I want to talk to you about, which are Pat McGovern related.
When I do my research for these shows, I mean, again and again, the thing that kept getting called out was that you co-invented optogenetics, which helped us understand how the brain works in profound new ways that we couldn't before, and that you developed expansion microscopy, which is kind of swelling parts of the body and the brain so that we can understand them better. I was curious, though, you know, when you're reflecting on your work, yeah, what are the things that really stand out to you during your career?