For a few years now, I’ve taught a course at
MIT called “Principles of Neuroengineering.”
The idea of the class is to get students thinking
about how to create neurotechnology
innovations—new inventions that can solve
outstanding scientific questions or address
unmet clinical needs. Designing
neurotechnologies is difficult because of the
complex properties of the brain: its
inaccessibility, heterogeneity, fragility,
anatomical richness, and high speed of
operation. To illustrate the process, I decided
to write a case study about the birth and
development of an innovation with which I
have been intimately involved: optogenetics—
a toolset of genetically encoded molecules
that, when targeted to specific neurons in the
brain, allow the activity of those neurons to be
driven or silenced by light.
