Science fiction has long floated the idea of a device that can produce any kind of object one can imagine. Star Trek called it a replicator, while other writers have referred to it as a Santa Claus Machine.

We may be centuries away from a single machine that can conjure up whatever we demand at a moment’s notice, but we are not far off creating a variety of things we desire in laboratory conditions. We currently rear animals for meat and dairy, cut down forests for wood, harvest organs from the deceased and mine the earth for diamonds.

But what if all these things, and more, could be grown in a lab?