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 underway. 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 milliliters 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.
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 company hopes to use these cells and others like them to re-create as closely as possible the process of making human milk. 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. “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. “If you can breast-feed—do it. Great. But the reality is, a majority of parents cannot exclusively breast-feed. . . . And that’s not for lack of trying.”
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