Brilliant 10: Adam Cohen Lights Up Neurons to See How They Fire
Adam Cohen Marius BuggeGoodbye, electrodes; hello, bright lights. Other 13-year-old boys want cash for their bar mitzvah. Adam Cohen asked for an oscilloscope. Shortly thereafter, he startled his parents by wandering into the living room with a home-built EKG machine taped to his chest. "They were a bit concerned that I was going to electrocute myself," Cohen recalls, "but apart from that, they were supportive." Cohen, now a chemistry professor at Harvard, is still fascinated with electrical signals-in particular, with learning how they propagate in the brain. Researchers traditionally implant electrodes in order to measure neuronal activity, but that approach can Adam CohenAge 33Harvard Universityread only a few cells at a time. Cohen wanted to engineer entire neurons to glow when they fire. To do this, he turned to a protein that a microbe from the Dead Sea uses to convert sunlight into electrons. Maybe, he thought, it could work in...