Animal Models

Understanding New Brain Research Models

Scientists can now grow living human brain tissue in lab dishes and in animals, creating organoids, neural transplants, and chimeras. While these models will help us better understand the brain in health and disease, they also raise thorny ethical questions that will only get thornier in the future.

Understanding Animal Models

What does experimenting with other animals tell us about people? Find out in our new Brain Basics article.

Keeping a Close Eye on Organoids

New stem cell-based brain models may yield insights into development and function, disease and possible therapies. But as the power of the models advances, so do the ethical concerns they raise.

Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Vocal Learning

Most mammals know from birth how to make sounds that communicate, but not humans. And not bats: Dana grantee Michael Yartsev has collected reams of data on how Egyptian fruit bats learn to make sounds to communicate as a way to understand how we do it.

Build a Better Brain Model

Organoids, chimeric cells, and other new experimental biotech offer us ways to study things we've never had access to before and ethical questions anew.

Touch-a-Brain, Grades 6-8

Scientists in Bunkers

These neuroscientists warn that propaganda, political pressure, and outright violence by opponents of animal research now threaten to curtail progress in fields from behavior to psychopharmacology, from addiction to stroke.

Animal Fear and Human Guilt

A pioneer of research on temperament looks at recent research on the neural bases of fear.