Jordi Soriano Fradera is a Spanish physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Barcelona, where he leads the Neurophysics Group and serves as vice-director of the university’s Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He earned his PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona before completing postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Germany and in neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For more than fifteen years, his group has developed in vitro neuronal cultures and biophysical models to study how connectivity and collective dynamics give rise to brain function, and how they break down in neurological disease. He has collaborated closely with medical teams on Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s disease, and coordinated research under the EU Horizon 2020 NEU-CHiP project on biological computing.

In this InterDialogue, recorded in Soriano’s lab among live neuronal cultures and imaging equipment, we trace his path from studying fluid fronts in porous media as a condensed matter physicist to a twenty-year career in neurophysics. We discuss how his group engineers rat and human stem-cell-derived neuronal cultures to model the brain’s structural and functional connectivity and to serve as disease models for Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s, the prospects and limits of cell transplantation and personalized medicine, and why Soriano estimates a twenty-year horizon before such approaches reach the clinic. We also discuss his work on network damage, resilience, and criticality in neuronal cultures, the NEU-CHiP project’s attempt to train living neurons to perform computation, neuromorphic chips that mimic neurons in silicon, and a striking experiment in which donated human brain tissue was made to play back a melody fed to it through a robotic piano.

We close by considering the ethical stakes of coupling neuronal cultures with robots and augmented-human technologies, Soriano’s efforts to help build neuroscience research capacity in Nigeria and Latin America, and his concerns about inequality, the commercialization of medicine, and the pressure scientists face to publish quickly. He ends with his hopes for the next five to ten years: a deeper understanding of memory, computation, and the coupling of biological and electronic circuits.

Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction

3:07 – From condensed matter physics to neuroscience

5:52 – Structural vs. functional connectivity in neuronal cultures

7:42 – Rat and human stem cell cultures

12:04 – Modeling Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and Sanfilippo

15:05 – The amyloid vs. tau debate in Alzheimer’s

16:51 – Cell transplantation and personalized medicine

19:12 – In vitro limits and treatment timelines

24:01 – Network damage, resilience, and criticality

27:59 – The NEU-CHiP project and biological computing

31:12 – Neuromorphic chips and biology-silicon hybrids

33:08 – The piano-playing brain tissue experiment

36:03 – Augmented humans and brain implant ethics

40:28 – Neurodegeneration, aging, and the pursuit of longevity

42:19 – Building neuroscience capacity in Africa and Latin America

48:00 – Fears about inequality and scientific ethics

51:44 – A five-to-ten-year outlook on memory