Lab-Grown Leather Could Be a Reality In 5 Years

fangmcgee writes "Lab-grown leather apparel could hit the runways in as little as five years—all without harming a hair on a single animal's head, according to Andras Forgacs, co-founder and CEO of Modern Meadow, a Missouri-based startup that's approaching meat-and-leather production from a tissue-bioengineering, rather than farming, point of view. Backed by Breakout Labs, the grant-awarding foundation headed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Modern Meadow seeks to combine regenerative medicine with three-dimensional printing to synthesize leather and ultimately meat."

Re:And what will happen ...

[Verdatum]

The same fears happened when vinyl pleather first came out. The same fears happened when man-made diamonds became feasible. The market adjusts. The skins still get sold, and the price of the original commodity usually doesn't drop as much as people fear.

Re:Leather is a wonderful material.

[WillAdams]

Leather is constrained in size by how large a cow will grow, in thickness by the thickest point available for a given area (if you want to work really large, you can't get hides as thick as if you're willing to work smaller) and in quality by how pampered the creature was in its life (Rolls Royce uses cows raised in special pastures w/ wooden fencing (no barbed wire) and the hides which they reject would be top quality elsewhere).

Also, presumably this material won't require the tanning process, so one will get material equivalent to vegetable tanned w/o the nasty chemicals of chrome tanned.

Moreover, even though leather can be considered a by-product of the meat industry, it's not cheap --- a full hide is well over $100.

William