• A speculative proposal was floated to encode a “statistical connectome” directly into DNA: a chromosomal cassette that programs timed histone modifications to drive successive waves of cell-type differentiation, axon/dendrite growth rates, and cell-cell homing cues—essentially reversing lineage-tracing logic to build neural circuits without specifying every synapse.

• Participants debated whether quorum-sensing odor gradients could guide dendritic “homing,” but worried that too few molecular signals exist and that diffusion would blur precision; breadth-first genomic encodings were suggested to let early neurons connect as soon as their partners are born.

• The practicality of 3-D neural wiring was questioned: it was argued that any 3-D connection graph can be flattened to 2-D, and microfluidic channels or even “circuit-board” style axon stapling were proposed as ways to physically constrain growing squid-giant-axon segments.

• Recent resources shared include Doudna’s 10-year CRISPR/Cas9 review (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.add8643), Dylan Morris’s protein-language-model startup (Madani et al. tweet), and videos of axons growing inside microfluidic devices (YouTube links provided).

• Sci-Hub downtime (sci-hub.se) was noted as a barrier to accessing paywalled literature, prompting discussion of alternative access routes.