Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

and the search for the elusive production of spider silk because they speak to an insufficiency of the human skin and body, a need to bind it, suture it, stitch it, repair it, cover it, arm it, and protect it. Penetrated by malignant moles, bullets, and burns, by scars and sunburns and warts, skin has seemingly been released from a role as an epidermal envelope, a mediator between world and self, to become something both endangered and replaceable.


Recently, scientists at Manchester University developed a printer able to produce human skin. Using the same principle as an ink-jet printer, skin cells are taken from a patient’s body, multiplied, then printed out, creating a tailor-made strip of skin, ready to sew on to the body. The wound’s dimensions are entered into the printer to ensure a perfect fit.5 Still in the early stages of development, it is not known how the printed skin will react to that other sense of skin – touch. Printed skin might look right, but feel wrong, or not feel at all. It might be, in other words, a trick, from the French word tricoter to knit or knot together, and thus deceive or riddle.6