Rafael Yuste: The novel neurotechnologies: impact in science, medicine, and society

In this plenary session, Rafael Yuste of Columbia University discusses novel neurotechnologies. "People say it's just too complicated (to understand the brain)," says Yuste. "We do have methods that allow us to see the entire activity of the brain, but not enough resolution of a single neuron. I believe we don't have the right method yet. We need to be able to record from inside the neuron and capture every single spike in every neuron in brain circuits."

Rafael Yuste is Professor of Biological Sciences and Neuroscience at Columbia University. He was born and educated in Madrid, where he obtained his MD at the Universidad Autónoma in the Fundación Jimenez Diaz Hospital. He performed PhD studies with Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel's laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. He then moved to Bell Labs, where he was a postdoctoral student of David Tank and Winfried Denk. In 1996 he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. In 2005 he became HHMI Investigator and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits at Columbia and in 2014 Director of the Neurotechnology Center at Columbia.