MILKING IT

Can breast milk—the gold standard in infant nutrition—bve re-created in a lab?

- MOLLY FISCHER

Not long ago, I suited up in a white coat and safety goggles and entered a quiet laboratory where an experiment at the frontiers of science and parenthood was under way. A young engineer with a tidy beard escorted me past rows of benches to a large freezer. He opened it to reveal an array of ice-caked steel drawers and, wearing blue Cryo-Gloves (reverse oven mitts, essentially), removed a small bottle from the chill, which measured minus eighty degrees Celsius. At the bottom of the bottle, two hundred and fifty millilitres of liquid had formed a shallow, colorless puck.

I was visiting Biomilq, a startup, founded by Leila Strickland and Michelle Egger, that is working to produce lab-grown breast milk. Biomilq’s headquarters are in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, a seven-thousand-acre wedge of pine forests and office complexes between Durham, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. The bottle creaked as it began to adjust to the room’s warmth, and the engineer hastened to put it back in the freezer.