Lab-grown ‘minibrains’ are revealing what makes humans special
By Ann GibbonsNov. 9, 2017 , 8:00 AM
Ever since Alex Pollen was a boy talking with his neuroscientist father, he wanted to know how evolution made the human brain so special. Our brains are bigger, relative to body size, than other animals', but it's not just size that matters. "Elephants and whales have bigger brains," notes Pollen, now a neuroscientist himself at the University of California, San Francisco. Comparing anatomy or even genomes of humans and other animals reveals little about the genetic and developmental changes that sent our brains down such a different path.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/lab-grown-minibrains-are-revealing-what-makes-humans-special
