Tabulating a complete science-backed list of the advantages of breast milk over infant formula can be a challenge. Some much cited research also credits breast milk with producing smarter children, although this is difficult to substantiate. The health benefits that have been attributed to breast milk include protection against asthma, diabetes, diarrhea, ear infections, eczema, obesity, and sudden infant death syndrome. And that’s not for lack of trying.”īreast milk is often described as a kind of elixir-“perfect nutrition,” in the words of a 2015 paper in Early Human Development. But the reality is, a majority of parents cannot exclusively breast-feed. . . . “Our opinion as a company-and most of us internally, too-is that breast-feeding, at the breast, has benefits that no one will ever be able to mimic,” Egger, a food scientist turned entrepreneur, told me.

About three years before my visit, in February of 2020, Biomilq announced that it had successfully used cells to produce lactose and casein, a sugar and a protein found in breast milk. The company hopes to use these cells and others like them to re-create as closely as possible the process of making human milk. You could call the bottle’s contents Biomilq, or maybe just milk, or, as the engineer did-indicating a number of smaller bottles also stowed in the freezer-“our best shots to date.” The frozen puck represented a week and a half’s worth of output from a single line of lab-cultured human mammary cells. The bottle creaked as it began to adjust to the room’s warmth, and the engineer hastened to put it back in the freezer. 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. I was visiting Biomilq, a startup, founded by Leila Strickland and Michelle Egger, that is working to produce lab-grown breast milk. At the bottom of the bottle, two hundred and fifty millilitres of liquid had formed a shallow, colorless puck. 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. A young engineer with a tidy beard escorted me past rows of benches to a large freezer. 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.

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