American scientists say they have developed a way to grow wood material in a laboratory. The method could create different wood products indoors in a single process, greatly cutting the cost of production and reducing damage to the world’s forests. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated a proof of concept by growing wood-like structures from cells taken from the leaves of a flowering plant. The results were recently reported in a study appearing in the Journal of Cleaner Production. The lead researcher on the project was Luis Fernando Velsquez-Garca, a scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories.