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Real Leather Without Cows Modern Meadow Biofabrication

Want leather, but don't want to hurt animals? Modern Meadow has your back with a biofabrication plan to raise leather without the living animal.

Modern Meadow CEO and co-founder Andras Forgacs explains that biofabrication involves the design of cells to produce and assemble collagen and other proteins to yield leather that is “biologically identical” to traditional types.

Biofabrication is environmentally beneficial, he believes. He said, “We’re making a material that has no hair flesh or fat on it. So the liming and toxicity you see elsewhere in the leather trade is eliminated.”

Chief Creative Officer for Modern Meadow, Suzanne Lee, said the company’s processes can generate leather that’s made to a designer’s specifications and imbued with desirable traits like a certain flexibility, elasticity, thinness or thickness.

Once produced, the leathers can go to a tannery for additional dyeing, she noted.

Science fiction fans recall plastissue is artificial skin from Accidental Flight (1952), by W.F. Wallace - although using human DNA. It's not too much of a stretch to think that animal skin might also be possible. In fact artificial skin swatches are available for purchase; see Artificial Skin Swatches Mass-Produce.

Via TechCrunch.

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