Becoming is bursting at the seams because it has been busy trying to build something groundbreaking - a new type of metabolic exchange system. Those words could apply to a lot of things, but, in this case, Becoming has found a way to grow and sustain a placenta outside of a body. Becoming uses this lab-grown placenta to nurture a mouse embryo, and it can observe what takes place as the embryo’s cells divide and grow. In other words, Becoming has engineered a new means of supporting the developmental process outside of the body and analyzing it in excruciating detail. In other, other words, Becoming can watch life unfold and perhaps do so for very long periods of time, and this could alter our understanding of the body in profound ways.
“No one has done this before,” says Cohen. “It’s not in the scientific literature.”
