For many brain disease — dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and others — doctors can only treat the symptoms. Medical science does not have a cure.

Why? Because it’s confounding to cure what we don’t understand, and the human brain, with its millions of neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, is almost hopelessly complex.

A Princeton-led team of scientists has now made a massive step toward understanding the human brain by building a neuron-by-neuron and synapse-by-synapse roadmap — scientifically speaking, a “connectome” — through the brain of an adult fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster).

Read more: https://www.princeton.edu/news/2024

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