Dr. Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has assembled a team of nine top European scientists to build a computer model of a human brain in 12 years.

The Human Brain Project is in discussion with the EU for a £1 billion grant. The project has already created an artificial neocortical column that is unique to mammals, digitally constructed using a software model of tens of thousands of neurons.

Supercomputers at the Jülich Research Center near Cologne are earmarked to play a vital role in the research. Jülich neuroscientist Katrin Amunts has begun work on a detailed atlas of the brain that involves slicing one into 8,000 parts, which are then digitized with a scanner.

‘It is not impossible to build a human brain. We can do it in just over 10 years,” says Henry Markram, director of the project. “This is one of the three grand challenges for humanity. We need to understand earth, space and the brain. We need to understand what makes us human,” Markram told Germany’s Spiegel magazine.

It could also lead to intelligent robots and supercomputers,