Conducting any biological experiment can be laboriously slow. And in neuroscience, the pace of research can be glacial. Measuring variations in electrical current over the length of a nerve cell, for instance, is meticulous and time-consuming work. Determing the amount of voltage passing through a sodium channel (a conduit for communication) can eat up time and lab resources.

Given the grueling nature of the work, the notion of doing brain research in virtual space --where minor adjustments can be made with the flick of a keystroke-- is incredibly seductive. So it's not surprising that the field of computational neurobiology -- where researchers use computer technology to study the cell networks comprising the central nervous system -- has mushroomed in the past several years.

"This seems like an obvious way to do science," says Dave Bilitch, the Bower lab's versatile programming whiz. "Modeling gives you a way of experimenting without actually having to do a real physical experiment. You can make your theory about what you think a cell is doing, and if it doesn't work, you may be able to postulate what it needs."

Not until the recent development of graphics workstations, however, did scientists have the tools to devise computer models of biological structures. The Bower lab was among the first to develop software to run these simulations. GENESIS (General Network Simulation System) was originally devised by Matthew Wilson, now at MIT, when he was a graduate student in the Bower lab during the late 1980s. The software program, first released in 1990 and now used at hundreds of labs around the world, is a neural simulator that can recreate in the computer a neuron's subcellular processes, networks of cells and even systems of cell networks.

--Linda Marsa