Don't Fear 'Frankenfood.' We're Already Living in the Lab-Grown Future.
Many people prefer naturally produced over man-made. But isn't there something just as compelling about the stuff that thousands of people collaborated to make?
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.
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.
In the 1990s, genetically modified foods (GMOs) were labeled Frankenfoods by sensationalist media and activists. Wild claims circulated that GMOs would cause cancer or environmental ruin. Bans and strict regulations ensued. But over time, evidence showed GMO crops to be as safe as conventional ones. They delivered real benefits such as reducing pesticide use and boosting yields. More than 70 percent of processed foods in America contain GMO ingredients, and billions of meals have been eaten without ill effect.
The first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby was described as a bioethical catastrophe waiting to happen. Millions of healthy, happy kids later, hardly anyone even calls them "test-tube babies" anymore.
Giving in to the suspicion of the new has costs. Europe famously resisted GMOs, along with many other biotech innovations. (Interestingly, many of the same countries that have banned GMOs have astonishing high rates of IVF: 5 percent to 10 percent of live births, compared with closer to 2 percent in the U.S.) In our cover story, "Why Europeans Have Less," Sam Bowman describes what happens when you trade away future economic growth in a mistaken attempt to preserve an imagined golden past and the semblance of control.
Lab-grown diamonds come in for disdain despite the fact that they are carbon crystals with the same atomic structure and sparkle as mined gems, grown in a matter of weeks in high-tech machines rather than over millennia underground. But by 2024, an estimated 45 percent of engagement rings in the U.S. were set with lab-grown diamonds, up from virtually zero a decade prior. In the Henan province, a hub sometimes called the Diamond Capital of China, dozens of factories use high-pressure, high-temperature presses to churn out diamonds by the ton.
Humans are sentimental, irrational creatures, hung up on invisible histories. We imbue objects with meaning based on their provenance rather than their properties. We prefer natural or even magical to man-made. But isn't there something just as compelling about an ear or a ring or a milkshake or even a baby that dozens or even thousands of people collaborated to man-make from the building blocks of the universe? It's a story at least as awe-inspiring as the natural processes that result in the same stuff. A bed of moss and quilt are both nice places to have a picnic, but only one of them has the added charm of being made with good intentions by human hands.
Each of these arcs carries the same lesson: Humans have a tendency to greet transformative innovations with reflexive fear and moral outrage. But time and again, the feared outcomes—whether "designer babies," "mutant foods," or "unnatural bodies"—fail to materialize in the nightmare form imagined. Instead, the technology, applied by responsible hands, improves lives and often becomes mundane.
Somewhere in the world today, there's probably a young adult conceived through IVF, wearing a lab-grown diamond engagement ring, and drinking a smoothie made with synthetic whey protein. She's not a monster. She's indistinguishable from her naturally conceived, blood diamond–wearing, raw milk–drinking counterpart. If anything, she's probably rather dull. I bet she can't even drive a go-kart.
We're already living in the lab-grown future. It's not a dystopia of artifice. It looks like healing and luxury and choice. It's a wave of meaningful improvements in our lives that we should greet with a cheerful "Yeah, why not?"
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Our Lab-Grown Future."
