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SOLOMON Snyder of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore points to
a photograph of the first brain cells to have been grown in a laboratory.
According to Snyder, the ability to grow such cells under experimental conditions
has important implications for the scientific understanding of the nervous
system, although he acknowledges that ‘we ourselves do not know what we
did to make this work’. The image of mature brain cells – known as HCN-I
neurons – demonstrates how the cells appear to be making contact with one
another.