In the past 40 years or so, drug therapy has revolutionized psychiatry. Ideas about complexes, sublimation, super-ego conflicts and so on, have been replaced by concerns for neurotransmitter deficits, endorphins and receptors. But drug therapy is still a crude business. New psychotropic drugs are largely chance products, and their effects and side-effects must be found out the hard way. Daedalus plans to advance the art.

He points out that brain cells can now be cultured in vitro. One pioneering study used mouse brain cells, encouraged to grow and divide by epidermal growth factor. (This makes sense; the skin and the brain both grow from the same primitive set of embryonic cells.) In the right environment, says Daedalus, such cultured cells should start to put out dendrites and axons, and make connections with each other. A petri dish bearing a single sheet of cells might be best; their axons could wander freely over the surface of the sheet.

This ‘brain pan’ of interconnected cells will have no long-range structure or order. But it should be a splendid test-bed for psychotropic drugs, and theories of brain function and dysfunction. Once the brain pan has fully grown, Daedalus will lower test electrodes to touch specific cells in its monolayer. A pulse will be injected into one electrode. The cells around it which fire in response will be identified, and their connections with the central cell will be traced. Then a drug, neurotransmitter or brain metabolite will be added to the culture, and its effect on pulse transmission will be noted.

At first Daedalus will seek to understand the effects of known drugs. He will then test the resulting theories by trying new ones. No test animals will need to be sacrificed or human subjects risked; the most drastic or speculative notions will be easily tried. In particular, he plans to use widely separated electrodes to impose electroshock therapy on the brain pan, and to look for collective epileptic seizures in it.

By damaging selected cells of the brain pan, and noting its responses, Daedalus hopes to gain insights into Parkinsonism, Alzheimer's disease, and the other dismal brain deteriorations. Will the surrounding cells try to make other connections? Will local stem cells differentiate to replace lost neurons? Can a drug, a growth hormone or implanted new cells encourage these processes? Positive answers will bring cheer to ageing citizens and State pension and health agencies alike.