Modern Meadow Makes Leather and Meat Without Killing Animals

Gabor Forgacs holds up a portfolio labeled Global Leathers in shiny gold print. “I want you to feel this,” he says, opening the samples folder to a black square of material. It feels soft and supple, like a kid glove. “Now feel this,” he says, presenting a grayish rectangle the size of a business card. It feels every bit as buttery as the other sample. “Smell it,” he says. Though it has the pungent aroma of freshly tanned animal hide, the swatch is made of biopsied bovine cells multiplied in a flask.

While other companies in the emerging field of tissue engineering focus on supplying the medical market, Forgacs’s business, Modern Meadow, plans to sell lab-grown leather—and eventually meat—to consumers. Forgacs, 65, a biophysicist who heads the University of Missouri’s biological physics lab and Clarkson University’s innovation center, launched the company in 2011 with two Missouri colleagues and his son, Andras, 36, a former venture capitalist and McKinsey consultant. “Leather is a gateway product for us,” Andras Forgacs says amid racks of tissue cultures in their lab at a state-sponsored tech incubator in Columbia, Mo.