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A top British professor has told a cutting-edge ideas conference he is close to building a replica human brain. Professor Henry Markham told the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design global conference that a working synthetic brain can be built in the next decade. He told his audience: "It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years." He set himself a challenge by stating that if he succeeded, he would “send a hologram to T.E.D. to talk.” Professor Markram is director of the Blue Brain project, which aims to engineer mammals' brains from laboratory data. He has already had success with creating parts of a rat’s brain. Markham said the human brain was so complex, it was an “almost frightening organ”.

Professor Markham hoped his research would lead to new treatments for mental illnesses. He said: "There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder." Markham believes synthetic brain technology will reduce the need for experiments on animals. "We cannot keep on doing animal experiments forever," he said. This will please many animal rights activists, who say such research is cruel. He hopes to create a kind of “Noah’s Ark” of animal brain models. Professor Markham provided a simple explanation of his work: "It's a bit like going and cataloguing a bit of the rainforest….But it is a bit more than cataloguing because you have to describe and discover all the rules of communication, the rules of connectivity."

www.breakingnewsenglish.com