From Germany, a Way to Mass-Produce Artificial Human Skin
Skin does more than look good (or, in my case, get covered in pimples and easily burned by the sun). It also protects the body from infection, dehydration, and a generally hostile world. As a result, victims of burns and skin diseases face serious problems beyond the obvious issues of pain and aesthetics. For years, doctors have tried use synthetic skin for grafts and repairs, but the process to create that synthetic skin has always been expensive and time-consuming. Now, a team from Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft science institute have created a way to mass-produce artificial skin, complete with blood vessels, that can be used for grafts, plastic surgery, or even cosmetics testing. The basic skin production system, which Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft hopes to start selling next year, can produce 5,000 little swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced...