A patient's budding cortex -- in a dish?

(NIH/National Institute of Mental Health) Scientists have perfected mini cultured 3-D structures that grow and function much like the outer mantle -- the key working tissue, or cortex -- of the brain of the person from whom they were derived. Strikingly, these 'organoids' buzz with neuronal network activity. Cells talk with each other in circuits, much as they do in our brains.