Scientists grew a human ear on a mouse's back and moved on

In 1997, newspapers around the world ran a photograph of a hairless mouse with what looked like a human ear growing out of its back. It wasn't a hoax. Researchers from the University of Massachusetts and MIT had grown human cartilage cells over a scaffold shaped like an ear and implanted it under the mouse's skin. Since then, scientists have inserted human genes into rats, mice and primates to create chimeras for medical research; in 2007, researchers at the University of Nevada School of Medicine created the world's first human-sheep chimera, an animal with the body of a sheep and partly human organs.

Richard Louv calls the era these children are growing up in the third frontier. The first frontier, closed in 1893 according to historian Frederick Jackson Turner, was land itself running out. The second was the romanticized, remembered version of that land, the family farm and the summer camp and the treehouse, which lasted through most of the twentieth century. The third frontier is different in kind. It is defined, Louv argues, by a severing of children from the source of their food, an increasingly intellectual rather than physical relationship with other animals, and a fading line between machines, humans and other creatures.

Louv contrasts his own life with that of his friend Nick Raven, a former New Mexico farmer. When Raven's daughter was small, she came home one day to find her favorite goat, which had followed her around like a pet, skinned and strung up in the barn, because the family needed the meat. Raven has no regrets; he believes his daughter now knows, for the rest of her life, that meat doesn't arrive plastic-wrapped. Louv doesn't want that experience for his own sons. But he points out that most children today have neither Raven's harsh clarity nor any real alternative: they know about factory farming in the abstract, without any direct encounter with where food comes from at all.

The paradox Louv sits with is that this new frontier isn't simply worse than the old one. Children today can hear researchers describe how humpback whales use rhyme the way human composers do, a discovery that inspires real wonder without requiring a farm or a rifle. But he is clear that this kind of knowledge is not a substitute for direct contact with a living, breathing animal, and that a generation raised entirely on the intellectualized version of nature, with the messy, morally complicated parts edited out, is missing something no amount of information can replace.

Give your child one direct, physical link to where things actually come from: a garden bed they tend themselves, a fishing trip where they see the whole process, a visit to a working farm. Talk plainly with them about where meat, vegetables and everyday materials originate, letting a little of the mess and complexity through rather than editing it all into something clean and abstract. When you have the choice, pick the real tide pool over the mall aquarium, the real creek over the video of one. And when strange biotechnology news turns up, a lab-grown organ, an engineered plant, treat it as something worth discussing together rather than something too odd to mention.