John G. White
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge
Builder The claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open
John G. White was the first author of The Structure of the Nervous System of the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in November 1986. The paper reconstructed the adult hermaphrodite’s 302 neurons from serial thin-section electron microscopy, identifying every chemical synapse and gap junction between them.
The reconstruction was done at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge under Sydney Brenner’s program. It required tracing neural processes across hundreds of serial sections by hand, and it produced the dataset that every later connectome project measures itself against. The corrected, self-consistent reassembly of White’s materials by Varshney and colleagues in 2011 remains the reference version of the worm’s wiring.
This site’s Builder category refers to White’s authorship of the foundational connectome dataset. The 1986 paper states structure. It is the base case for the whole brain emulation question this site tracks, since any claim that a wiring diagram can generate behavior has to pass through this dataset first.
Known for. First author of the 1986 complete C. elegans nervous system reconstruction
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
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Sydney BrennerMRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CambridgeFounding the C. elegans research program, the 1986 connectome, the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- Matt AngleParadromicsFounder and CEO of Paradromics, developer of the Connexus Direct Data Interface high-data-rate brain-computer interface
- Isabella R. BeckettCoauthor of the MaleCNS preprint comparing male and female Drosophila brain connectomes
- Stuart BergFirst author of the MaleCNS preprint on the male Drosophila central nervous system
- Edward BoydenMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Howard Hughes Medical InstituteExpansion microscopy, optogenetics, connectomics tools for consciousness research
- Kwanghun ChungMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyFirst author of CLARITY, hydrogel-tissue transformation for intact brain imaging
John G. White is listed with the other builders, who hold that the claim is about what the hardware does, and the philosophy is left open. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.