The cellular basis of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism, is not well understood, and it is important to establish in vitro models that recapitulate neural development in humans. Now, Flora Vaccarino and colleagues report the development of multilayered structures from human induced pluripotent stem cell lines (hiPSCs) that harbor hallmarks of the embryonic telencephalon (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, published online 3 July 2012; doi:10.1073/pnas.1202944109). Methods to culture cortical tissues from embryonic stem cells have been reported, and the authors applied these protocols to hiPSCs. The resulting three-dimensional structures included neural tube–like substructures, radial glia–like progenitors and more mature neurons. After the cultures had been differentiated 70 days in vitro, the authors observed immature synaptic boutons and immature synapses. Analysis of the transcriptomes of cultures at day 50 identified thousands of genes that were differentially expressed relative to undifferentiated hiPSCs, and pathway analyses suggested enrichment for neural development genes. The transcriptome at day 50 was more typical of dorsal, rather than ventral, forebrain. Comparisons to human dorsal forebrain at 15 different time points showed that the transcriptome at day 50 had the best correlation with cerebral cortex at 4–10 weeks postconception.