This is a scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky.

Got a minute?

Voice is generated by a complex and beautiful biological system and this is a system that allows all of us to

communicate messages, concepts and emotions.

Nathan Wellum of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, but a person can lose his or her voice because of severe damage to the vocal cords, also called the vocal fold mucosa.

In these situations where the vocal fold mucosa... also called the Vocal Fold Mukosa.

In these situations where the Vocal Fold Mukosa

is severely damaged or missing,

and with present technology unfixable,

the best option may be to simply replace it.

Wellum spoke at a telephone press conference on November 17th,

in conjunction with the announcement that he and colleagues had succeeded in generating

bioengineered vocal fold mucosa that were capable of producing sound,

a first step toward implants one day.

Their study is in the journal Science.

The research team started with vocal cord tissue from a cadaver and from four patients who had had their voice boxes removed.

They took cells from those tissue samples and successfully grew them on a three-dimensional scaffold to produce new vocal cords.

So how do the lab-grown vocal cords actually sound?

We did some functional testing where a larynx is mounted on a lab bench put on a fake windpipe and

hot warm humidified air just like in the body is blown through and sets the vocal

forth into vibration but they vibrate and generate sound just into the atmosphere.

And so the sound is quite different than what is coming out of my mouth at present.

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