The nervous system presents a challenge to the field of tissue engineering because some of its complex neurochemical and neuroanatomical architecture is just beginning to be understood. A combination of advances in molecular neurobiology, gene transfer techniques, and the concomitant advances in the engineering of biomaterials at a molecular level, are making tissue engineering in the nervous system possible. Due to the vast range of fields that this highly interdisciplinary task spans, any review is bound to be somewhat limited. Given that, this review attempts to cover some solutions engineered for: (a) the functional replacement of a missing neuroactive component; (b) the rescue or regeneration of degenerated neural tissue; and (c) the building of intelligent neural cell‐based biosensors and simple in vitro neural circuits based on controlled neural cell attachment to electrically relevant substrates. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.