I am all for a brain research that could maybe cure or prevent Alzheimer’s disease and most especially one that could fine tune stupid behaviors like Britney’s (and maybe her family’s).

However, there is this tiny-tiny part in me that would like to keep the brain (and how it works) a little mysterious.

But experts that look only at the human brain as wires-in-a-box are unstoppable like this one: lab-on-a-chip mimics brain chemistry that says:

Johns Hopkins researchers from the Whiting School of Engineering and the School of Medicine have devised a micro-scale tool - a lab on a chip - designed to mimic the chemical complexities of the brain. The system should help scientists better understand how nerve cells in the brain work together to form the nervous system.

“The chip we’ve developed will make experiments on nerve cells more simple to conduct and to control,” says Andre Levchenko, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering and faculty affiliate of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology.

Nerve cells decide which direction to grow by sensing both the chemical cues flowing through their environment as well as those attached to the surfaces that surround them. The chip, which is made of a plastic-like substance and covered with a glass lid, features a system of channels and wells that allow researchers to control the flow of specific chemical cocktails around single nerve cells.

Yeah right. But the human body (much more the brain that controls the whole body) isn’t a test tube. It isn’t even just a chemical cocktail either, as the rest of the body. Otherwise, they would have cured cancer and would have stopped cancer on its tracks in the first 5 years of cancer research.