Our Lab-Grown Future

THINGS DIDN'T GO well the first time Rebecca Torbruegge took a turn at the go-kart track. She ended up with a burn on her leg that refused to heal and eventually—skip the next bit if you're squeamish—"started bubbling." Doctors in Sydney quickly determined she'd need a graft. But instead of following the usual procedure of scraping a patch from the 22-year-old's backside, slapping it over the wound, and hoping for the best, researchers wondered if she'd like to try something new: custom-printed skin, laid down layer by layer by a machine, built from her own cells.

- By Katherine Mangu-Ward

Asked about her decision to become the first human recipient of bedside 3D bioprinting in May, Torbruegge offered this delightfully Australian understatement to a local news station: "I thought about it for a bit, and then thought, 'Yeah, why not?'"

Torbruegge might be garbage at go-karting, but she's right about how we should approach our lab-grown future. A new era of printed, cultured, grown, and engineered stuff is coming fast around the bend, and we should greet it with a shrug.

You can now eat a steak grown from cow cells that never saw a pasture, taste cheese made with whey protein brewed by microbes that have never passed through an udder, wear a diamond formed from lab-coaxed carbon, and shake hands with someone who has an ear 3D printed from her own cartilage cells. For a couple of decades now, we've been replacing bladders and tracheas and sections of burned flesh with living tissue that started in a sterile lab and ended up integrated into someone's body, pumping blood, producing mucus, or just sitting there looking pretty and unscarred.

There's always a backlash. Words such as unnatural, fake, Frankenfood, and synthetic get thrown around like accusations. The assumption is that anything born in a lab must be lesser, or at least deeply suspicious.