It's a lot easier to work with rat neurons. TL;DR a bit like "why use Postgres when you could be using Oracle?" ... or something, just thought of that because process overhead really does lead to safety and compliance audits

Opinion that's years out of date:

    * The biosafety level is lower (all human tissue is automatically BSL2 or BSL2+ because it might have HIV and stuff)
    * The best neural cultures (neurons + supporting cells) come from actual tissue, there aren't good stable immortal cell lines for neural cells. So this generally means fetal cells which for human tissue involves a boatload of process and bureaucracy. Fetal rats, *comparatively* have little bureaucracy.
    * iPSC cells (Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells / "stem cells harvested from adults") can generate neural cells but it's several stages removed, and still more process overhead if it's human tissue
    * It's better to harvest actual brain tissue than grow them from progenitor lines. You can grab partially or fully differentiated cells by dissecting them out of specific locations (i.e. hippocampal neurons, dopaminergic neurons, ...). Forcing a population of progenitor cells to develop into what you want is a massive pain / still an "unsolved problem" in the sense that you can't buy a grow-a-brain kit. (NOT facetious, most labs that aren't dirt poor use kits as much as possible and it is TOTALLY worth it)