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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