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Brain Balls

January 9, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2010, a young scientist named Madeline Lancaster was working in a lab in Vienna, trying to make a good impression. Her boss asked her to do a routine gene screen on mouse neural stem cells, but the special protein glue she needed hadn't arrived. Anxious to get started, she rummaged through a freezer, found a random tube of old glue-like proteins, and used them anyway. The next morning, the cells hadn't stuck to the dish. They were floating in cloudy liquid, which usually means they're dead. But before throwing them out, she took a peek under the microscope. Instead of dead cells, she saw weird beige blobs, each about the size of a grain of sand. When she zoomed in, she saw a tube. The cells had organized themselves into a structure that looked like a developing neural tube — the first step toward building a brain.

The Accidental Discovery of Brain Organoids

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (01:28) **The Accidental Discovery of Brain Balls** - Madeline Lancaster, a new postdoc in Vienna, botches a routine cell-culture experiment and stumbles onto something strange
  • 2 (06:10) **From Blobs to Architecture** - Madeline tries a different gel (Matrigel) and gets even more complex structures
  • 3 (09:33) **Secret Side Project with Human Cells** - While officially working on flat cell cultures, Madeline secretly keeps growing the floating balls
  • 4 (11:38) **The Lab Meeting Gasps** - Madeline presents her findings to the lab, and the reaction is immediate
  • 5 (12:46) **The Nature Paper and the Explosion** - Madeline and her boss publish in Nature, coining the term "cerebral organoids"
  • 6 (14:04) **What You Can See Now** - Organoids let researchers watch neurological disorders unfold from the start
  • 7 (15:40) **The Field Explodes** - Thousands of labs now use neural organoids to study epilepsy, schizophrenia, fetal alcohol syndrome, and more

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Guests on this episode

Carl Zimmer

Show Notes

When neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster was a brand new postdoc, she accidentally used an expired protein gel in a lab experiment and noticed something weird. The stem cells she was trying to grow in a dish were self-assembling. The result? Madeline was the first person ever to grow what she called a “cerebral organoid,” a tiny, 3D version of a human brain the size of a peppercorn.

In about a decade, these mini human brain balls were everywhere. They were revealing bombshell secrets about how our brains develop in the womb, helping treat advanced cancer patients, being implanted into animals, even playing the video game Pong. But what are they? Are these brain balls capable of sensing, feeling, learning, being? Are they tiny, trapped humans? And if they were, how would we know?

Special thanks to Lynn Levy, Jason Yamada-Hanff, David Fajgenbaum, Andrew Verstein, Anne Hamilton, Christopher Mason, Madeline Mason-Moriarty, the team at the Boston Museum of Science, and Howard Fine, Stefano Cirigliano, and the team at Weill-Cornell. 

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Latif Nasser
with help from - Mona Madgavkar
Produced by - Annie McEwen, Mona Madgavkar, and Pat Walters
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Natalie Middleton and Rebecca Rand
and Edited by  - Alex Neason and Pat Walters

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