Your Next Leather Wallet Could Be Grown In A Petri Dish
Petri-dish wallet Flickr user Romana CorrealeIn vitro leather production would be less controversial than growing hamburgers in the lab, Modern Meadow CEO Andras Forgacs says. Science has been trying for years to grow the perfect sirloin in a petri dish, but animal hides, rather than animal meat, might be a simpler, easier-to-sell product you can harvest in the lab. A company called Modern Meadow could have a full-scale leather production facility up and running within five years, CEO and cofounder Andras Forgacs says. Modern Meadow received a windfall this summer from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel to bio-print meat and leather, but the company tells Txchnologist it will focus on leather first. Laboratory leather will use a similar process as lab-grown meat, but it would require far less regulatory approval--and it may be more palatable anyway, Forgacs admits: "There's much less controversy around using leather that doesn't involve killing animals." Lab-grown leather...