The opening of “An Embryonic Idea,” an Economist article about the creation of “organoids,” which resemble human brains in numerous ways:

“REGENERATIVE medicine, the science of producing tissues and organs from stem cells, is a rapidly developing field. This week, however, it took a leap forward that was big even by its own demanding standards. A team of researchers led by Madeline Lancaster of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, in Vienna, announced that they have grown things which, while not human brains, resemble brains in important ways.

Dr Lancaster’s organoids, as she calls them, are a far cry from the brains in jars beloved of the writers of horror movies. But they do contain several recognisably different types of nerve cell and have anatomical features which look like those of real brains. They might be used to study, in ways that would be unethical in a living human being or impossible even in a mouse, the crucial early stages of brain development, and how they can go wrong. They could be employed to test drugs in ways that mere cell cultures cannot be. And because they can be made, if needed, from the cells of living people, they might even illuminate the particular problems of individual patients.”