Brain researchers off to head start in age-old quest

Five large freezers are stored on the third floor of a building that houses the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences.

The freezers are set at -80 C, the correct temperature to protect their valuable contents: more than 1,000 brain samples from various species.

The owner of these samples is Russian scientist Philipp Khaitovich, who is leading a team of 25 researchers in Shanghai.

Khaitovich, 40, is group leader of the Max Planck Society Partner Institute for Computational Biology. His research group currently has two goals: To find out why humans are smarter than other species, and to better understand the aging process.

Education and the way we teach children is of particular interest.

"Nobody knows the exact organization of the human brain. We are trying to understand how it works. If we succeed we can tailor education and the way we teach to suit the natural development of the brain."

To find the basis for better learning, Khaitovich's research group studies the connections between neurons in the brain.

"The human baby, or baby chimpanzee, do not have connections when they are born. The connections are formed based on the environment," Khaitovich says.

To find the way these connections are formed in humans compared to chimpanzees could help us to make humans even smarter, he explains.

Khaitovich's group is also looking at genetically related species, like macaques, to study aging.