when you look at India HeidelBerg Parts, while the Muslims there printed some texts and published a few newspapers, most of the printing/publishing business back then was in the hands of Christians and Hindus,” he said.
The newspapers in Singapore and Penang, he added, were ordinary secular publications run by Muslims, with Islamic topics receiving special coverage.
“But at the same time there were topics that were important to the Hindu community, such as temple management and the Hindu Association of Penang.
“Interestingly, the people freely wrote to these newspapers on internal troubles in their community or organisations despite the fact that the owners and editors were Muslims. And those letters were published.”
Instead, Markram switched to experimental neuroscience and in 1985 joined a Cape Town laboratory directed by a young researcher named Rodney Douglas. It was Douglas, now an emeritus professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who first fired Markram's enthusiasm for lab work and, with his exceptionally steady hands – useful when stitching together neurons smaller than a pinhead, Markram was soon enjoying a meteoric rise. A PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, one of the leading research universities in Israel, was followed by postdoctorates at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. Then, in 1995, Markram was lured back to the Weizmann as an associate professor.
There he earned a formidable reputation as an experimenter, becoming the first researcher to patch two connected neurons simultaneously. This put him in a position to see how they interacted in response to differently timed electrical signals.
However, by accumulating data on different cell types and the genes that encode for the expression of particular proteins and ion channels, Markram was able to model the electrical prosperities of the synapses and a form a picture of how they communicated and formed links with synapses in other parts of the column. Using his Blue Gene computer, he then ran statistical simulations to predict structures in parts of the column for which there was no experimental data. The final stage was to compare his model to the brains of real rats in his wet lab.
