The aim is to bring clarity in nomenclature and keep the focus on showing the overriding importance of context and architecture in how tissues and organs are formed and maintained.) Organoid cultures as models for the study of development and disease could not have occurred without the advances in what is now referred to as 3D cell cultures. Even though the first papers that were essentially doing 3D cultures/organoids started in the 1960s, the number of publications began to increase steadily from 2003 on, with a total of 640 publications up to the time this article was written in 2016. What the data in Fig. 2 show is that it took about half a century for the recognition that this way of thinking is not simply utilization of a technique but that form and function are fundamentally intertwined and that once the organism is formed, essentially, phenotype is dominant over genotype.
