We Shall Finally Map The Brain - EP 36 Andrew Payne

**Andrew Payne** (0:00)
So you can embed the brain in a swellable polymer, and then you add water, it swells, it makes the brain physically bigger. You can make it, these days, you can make it 20 times bigger in every dimension. And that physically moves apart the neurons. And so now, two wires that were overlapping that you couldn't resolve in a light microscope, now can be resolved.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:22)
So you're literally taking one of these samples and stretching it out. And I was just with Ed Boyden. I didn't know this because my immediately I was like, oh, well, you're going to get some crazy distortion when you start doing that. But I mean, he was telling me it's like still, I mean, they're finding it's like 99 percent holding scale and everything.

**Andrew Payne** (0:44)
It preserves the structure remarkably well. Even version 1 like preserves the structure remarkably well.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:07)
Welcome to the Core Memory Podcast, which I never usually say, but here we are. We're with Andrew Payne. You are the co-founder of E11 Bio.

**Andrew Payne** (1:17)
Yes.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:17)
Yes. And I wrote a story about you guys 18 months ago.

**Andrew Payne** (1:22)
It was back in December.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:24)
Okay, okay, okay. So it wasn't even that long ago. All right. Life is a blur.

**Andrew Payne** (1:29)
But yeah, I mean, thanks for having me here.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:31)
Thank you so much for coming on. You, I mean, I'll do the whole intro on you, but you work on a subject that is near and dear to my heart, which is imaging the brain. That's what E11 is doing.

**Andrew Payne** (1:44)
Yeah, you used to cover that back in the day.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:45)
I did. And now I think we got the brainiest podcast going. I mean, we go deep. I learned as I was researching you, which I didn't know before you went to the University of Toronto for undergrad. Are you Canadian?

**Andrew Payne** (2:00)
I am.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:01)
You are. All right. I didn't know that you disguised it.

**Andrew Payne** (2:04)
Yeah, I grew up in a suburb of Toronto, Mississauga.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:07)
Okay. And then you end up at MIT.

**Andrew Payne** (2:10)
Well, eventually, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:10)
Yes. Yeah. This is the quick bit. We're going to unpack all this as we go. But you end up at MIT.
You studied under Ed Boyden. Yes. And I was just with Ed Boyden.

**Andrew Payne** (2:24)
Excellent.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:24)
Yeah.
We will have an episode with him. I mean, it's hard to be more famous as a brain scientist than Ed is, I think.

**Andrew Payne** (2:35)
And it was really a wonderful adventure to be in his lab. So I would love to dig into that too.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:42)
I would like to talk about that because I feel like the most interesting people I tend to meet come from George Church's lab or Ed's lab. And there's this, you know, like-

**Andrew Payne** (2:50)
Yes, I did do both.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:51)
You did both. Okay, well, this is qualified. I feel like in the sports world, people do these coaching trees, where there's some famous head coach and then it's everyone who studied under them. I think somebody should do the George Church, Ed Boyden professorship tree at some point. But you're young and you're very distinguished. I mean, you invented important things that led to other big things around how we might understand the brain and image it, and just super accomplished. I mean, I knew you and we've talked, but as I was reading, I got more impressed.

**Andrew Payne** (3:32)
Well, I mean, there's a lot to do. So can't go too slowly right now, Ashlee.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:37)
Okay.

**Andrew Payne** (3:38)
It's like a really exciting time for NeuroTech.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:39)
Which is pretty much the heart of my first question. But I'm going to set the stage for people who are not total brain nerds a bit. I mean, there's been this thing called the connectome, which is roughly, I mean, vaguely equivalent to the genome of the brain. We've wanted to create this picture of a brain down to the neuron level, this very detailed map. I mean, I guess, like, conceptually it sounds easy enough, but it turns out to be quite difficult to do, because I think we created the first full brain of a worm, the C elegans. I think it was like 20 years ago.

**Andrew Payne** (4:23)
Longer, it was in the 70s.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:24)
In the 70s. Okay, so we did that, and that's like an accomplishment, but then we kind of went all the way until last year, or this year even, and did the fly.