Where Does Biomilq Come From, Mommy?

my thoughts on a developing progressive wonder product

In Chuck Palahniuk’s famous story Fight Club, Tyler Durden and The Narrator rummage through the trash of a liposuction clinic to harvest human fat to render for their soap business. The Narrator explains,

Tyler sold his soap to the department stores at $20 a bar. Lord knows what they charged. It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.

In our universe, a few similarly opportunistic rascals known as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Richard Branson have, through their co-founded investment fund, supplied the company Biomilq with $3.5 million in the hopes that it will be successful in bringing lab-grown breastmilk to market.¹ Per Biomilq’s website:

BIOMILQ is a women-owned, science-led, and parent-centered start-up that is creating cell-cultured human milk outside the body to bring the benefits of human milk to all babies regardless of their feeding circumstances. BIOMILQ is on a mission to increase infant feeding options for parents, nourish healthier babies, and contribute to a healthier planet.

You may be wondering how the process of making human milk outside the body is supposed to work. I am wondering the same thing. I’m particularly concerned about the step which precedes the first step in the manufacturing process as it is described on Biomilq’s website. That first step involves placing mammary epithelial cells into flasks with cell culture media which has the nutrients they need to replicate².

Now, my question is this: Where do these mammary epithelial cells come from? The best answer to this I’ve found is that this tissue comes from donors. Who are some of these donors?

They’re never trans kids who have undergone top reduction surgery…I hope.

I spent some time on Biomilq’s website looking for information on their tissue donors. Are they breast reduction patients? Women who have agreed to have their breasts biopsied for research? Are they people like de-transitioner Chloe Cole who regrets the double mastectomy performed on her at age fifteen?

Are there consent forms handed to trans kids at the time of their surgeries, allowing them to donate any bodily tissues collected during their operations to companies like Biomilq and their competitors for research and development purposes? I’m not sure why not. I mean…these tissues will otherwise end up in biohazard waste-bins, and that would be a real shame.

After perusing the “About Us” and “Our Science” sections of the website, the closest answer to my question I could achieve came from a short video which mentioned that, eventually, Biomilq aims to produce different batches of milk to reflect a variety of diets and to support a variety of needs and desires. For instance, they hope to produce batches that align with vegetarian diets, the needs of babies in later stages of development, and “still others from cells biopsied from individual people’s boobs - the bespoke suit of lab-grown milk.”

Individual people’s boobs? There’s that pesky erasure of women again…

I did, however, find some interesting information about Biomilq’s CEO and co-founder, Leila Strickland, PhD:

Here's a bit on my background (nerd alert!): 

The molecular mechanics used by all animal cells to control physical behaviors in space and time are fundamental at an evolutionary level and highly conserved across species. As a Ph.D. student, I researched sea urchin eggs as a model system to learn about how the events of cell division are…

I have to tell you, right away I don’t trust this person. Anyone who starts off their personal or professional bio with “nerd alert” is immediately placed on my shit list.

Lo and behold, Dr. Strickland is indeed a verifiable moral and economic ignoramus. Take her remarks during an interview³ with Molly Fischer for The New Yorker as supporting evidence of this claim:

“We want to make orders of magnitude more stuff than what the technology is designed for today, and we want to sell that stuff orders of magnitude cheaper.” When asked about the company’s target consumer, Strickland said that it would be a “worst-case scenario” for her if Biomilq replicated the inequalities that already plague infant feeding. “I won’t consider it a success until it’s fully accessible,” she told me.

So, Dr. Strickland puts the Access in DEIA…

I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

How does she fair in the Inclusion aspect of DEIA? She seems to call-out white men, so pretty great!

Dr. Strickland reflects on the story of Biomilq’s own infancy:

We spent months developing the vision for the company and pitching it to venture capitalists, many of whom were slick young “biobros” who wanted to invest in the next hot thing. Most of them were wealthy white men from Silicon Valley who had scarcely ever considered the purpose of breasts beyond the ornamental, some of whom clearly only attended the meeting for the boob jokes, and were surely disappointed. Some suggested a substitute good for our product was simply hiring a wet nurse. Many were uncomfortable being pitched by a middle-aged mom describing in gritty detail the efforts she had undertaken to extract milk from her own breasts in her first days of parenthood, and the downright depressing effects of her inability to do so. There’s a gross disconnect between the challenges of early-motherhood and those men with power who have no understanding of the struggles women face.

Some of these investors passed us by in favor of other startups in food tech, such as a company run by a dude with frosted tips and a tight t-shirt, who wanted to make chocolate-covered chickpeas and sell them as a “guilt-free” snack to women who feel ambivalent about their bodies. Some thought we were a great opportunity but were repulsed by our product concept and could not imagine feeding it to anyone in their all-plant-based family. Some wanted to support us, but their funding model would require that I uproot or leave my family and relocate from my small farm in North Carolina to New York or San Francisco for a few months of networking and mentoring with more founders half my age — no thanks. One even took our pitch on his cell phone while standing in line at a Trader Joe’s and said it all sounded great, but he just didn’t understand “our strategy.

Am I supposed to infer that non-white men are the only class of men who have ever considered what breasts can really do? Or that something is wrong with wearing frosted tips - a most clever way to pay homage to 1990’s Mark McGrath?

So, Silicon Valley is infested with immature men. I’m not a PhD, but…duh?

I really don’t get it. Mothers can donate real breastmilk and there is no federal law against selling real breastmilk to families in need of it. To my understanding, a mother in need or want of money can lactate for a great number of years as a job. She can advertise her special diet, whether she is producing at an early or later postpartum stage, third party testing of her milk, probably even her vaccination status, and so on. I’m not especially experienced in this area, but see here for a primer on this topic.

What would, say, $3.5 million accomplish if applied to efforts to advertise and promote the sale of real breastmilk? You know, the stuff Dr. Strickland knows to be so great because it's full of beneficial bacteria and antibodies, among other incredible and nutritious properties, that do not exist in Biomilq. If this self-proclaimed nerd and these obnoxiously rich assholes really cared about the nutrition of poor babies, they would be pressuring government to allow WIC and SNAP to cover the purchase of breastmilk from women in their local communities. But we can’t have that, can we? We can’t have big money going to poor people that is already earmarked for the oligarchs who own the formula manufacturers - and who will also ultimately control Biomilq.

Regardless of how Biomilq sources breast tissue, trans people who have had their breasts surgically removed who wish to provide any possible future children of theirs with breastmilk, or at least a product that claims to come as nutritionally close to it as possible, fall under the “non-lactating" category and will be part of the target demographic for this company. I asked myself why such a group might opt for lab-grown milk in lieu of donor milk or milk available for purchase online, for example, since that appears to be an option already. Perhaps this is one reason to keep the use of immature breast cells in the development of Biomilq hush-hush, if it is indeed part of the process; because some of the people relying on breastmilk alternatives may be de-transitioners who might understandably feel a little weird about this practice.

Of course, another reason to buy from Biomilq, if their product makes it to store shelves, is that they promise to be environmentally friendly. Yay.

But exactly how is this manufacturing process going to be more environmentally friendly than regular ass human breast milk? How is it going to be made cheaper than the current going rate of ~$2.00/oz? Am I the only one who senses this entire scheme was born of some backroom bet between billionaires to see if they can get young girls who cut off their breasts to buy Frankenmilk born of their own discarded mammary cells when it comes time to feed their infants of indeterminate gender?

Maybe so. And maybe all of this is just a figment of my own imagination. I didn’t sleep very well last night, come to think of it. All I know for sure is that, given the choice, I would rather buy breastmilk from Tyler Durden.

Thanks for rucking with me. Please enjoy the music as you exit.

1. https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/26137/20200620/billionaires-invest-environmentally-friendly-artificial-breast-milk-cultured-human-mammary.htm

2. https://www.biomilq.com/our-science

3. The New Yorker article in reference here, I noticed, is posted under a subsection of the publication called Brave New World Dept.. This subsection features articles titled freakishly stupid things such as “The Future of Fertility: A new crop of biotech startups want to revolutionize human reproduction” and “Will Holograms Solve the Social-Distancing Dilemma?” You really can’t make this shit up.