Think Tank 7

Silicon Human

Description:
The silicon human/digital human project is starting up world-wide, with significant driving force provided by Hiroaki Kitano, Adriano Henney and myself. It is being brought into fora including the ESF, ERC, FP7, IMI, BBSRC, BMBF, NWO, ESFRI et cetera. It was made quite explicit at a meeting in Tokyo early February where the Tokyo declaration was formulated. The idea is to start up a distributive research programme that is of the size of the man-on-the-moon project (NASA) and that will focus on obtaining computer models of a small number of living organisms, one bacterium, one primitive eukaryote (yeast), one plant, one mammal and the human, probably. The human will attract most attention for various reasons. The short name for the programme therefore is silicon or digital human. The progress will be asymptotic. I often state that in 30 years we will have 80% of the human done, provided the EU parliament, NIH and JST give massive support. Obviously NISB would be an important participant in this world-wide programme. It has the asset that it does link in with human biology (e.g. through my group, the neurosciences, and IBIVU), yet starts from molecular biophysics (VUA-FEW, FOM-AMOLF). Also it is already key in this type of network systems biology and drug oriented SB. This NISB think tank will, in two sessions, draft an action plan for the NISB activities in the silicon organism area.

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