What’s the Context:
What’s the News: Researchers have grown neurons from the cells of people with schizophrenia, in a study published online yesterday in Nature, the first time a complex mental illness has been modeled with living cells in a lab. This approach provides a new way to probe the little-understood biological processes underlying the disease and to test potential drug treatments. In preliminary experiments, the researchers found that the neurons weren’t as interconnected as healthy neurons are, and that individual patients’ neurons differ in their reaction to various drugs used to treat schizophrenia.

How the Heck:

The researchers took small samples of skin cells from four patients with schizophrenia, and programmed the cells to become induced pluripotent stem cells, a process that turns tissue-specific adult cells into undifferentiated stem cells. By treating those stem cells a certain way and putting them in a particular medium, the researchers nudged the stem cells to turn into neurons.
By infecting the cells with ...