Nature Makes Wood: Could a Lab Make It Better?

March 24, 2021

For millennia, humans have been chopping wood and harvesting plants, and how we’ve grown and extracted materials from the earth remains largely unchanged. A group of MIT researchers hopes to cut back on inefficiencies such as transportation and milling by growing wood-like plant tissue in the lab.

“The hope is that, if this becomes a developed process for producing plant materials, you could alleviate some of [the] pressures on our agricultural lands. And with those reduced pressures, hopefully we can allow more spaces to remain wild and more forests to remain in place.”
Ashley Beckwith, the study’s lead author and a mechanical engineering PhD candidate at MIT

Read the full article in Wired.

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