[Balgair]

Neuron creation is in the same pathway of the epithelium (skin). Meaning that neurons are more closely related to skin cells than to your liver cells. By bathing the cells in select biochemicals, you can make their daughter cells 'regress' back into earlier forms. Basically, walking the daughter cells back along the development path. These are called stem cells. Your bone marrow is chock full of blood-stem cells that turn into platelets and blood cells and other stuff. Currently, we can walk these cells back a long ways, like from blood cell to blood-stem cell. We're still working on how to go all the way back to cells that can turn into any cell that is chosen (pluripotent stem cells). All this lab is doing is taking skin cells and 'regressing' them back into stem cells that have neurons in their future path. They take biochemicals, apply them to the skin cells, and then apply other biochemicals to these stem cells to make them into neurons. We've been doing this for a few decades now in various species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis