Reverse engineering the brain

What do fruit-fly brains have in common with microchips? That´s not the setup for a bad joke; it´s David Adler´s life. Under Adler´s ultrasophisticated electron beam microscopes, advanced microprocessors with transistors far smaller than red blood cells have been reduced to their wiring diagrams. Now the noggin of the humble Drosophila melanogaster is next, as Adler is being courted by researchers at a neurobiology wing of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to help them reverse engineer the human brain. They´re starting small, with the fruit fly.