Cell adhesion century: culture breakthrough.

This theme issue, based on a Royal Society Discussion Meeting held in April 2014, is a celebration, a reflection and a prediction. To start, we celebrate the memory of Ross Granville Harrison FRS who first showed a century ago that chicken embryo nerve cells could be grown outside the animal [1]. This was the invention needed to begin the animal cell culture industry. Adhesion to a substrate was shown to be essential to survival and proliferation of the cells outside the organ. Harrison showed that there were several requirements for success, as he wrote in his paper