Fifty years ago, a soldier injured on the battlefield would be sewn up by medics using sheep’s gut. A hundred years earlier they would have used silk. Before that, metal wire. Today, surgeons often prefer plastics such as polypropylene. Sutures have a long and bizarre history, dating back to ancient Egypt where everything from tree bark to hair was used to stitch torn human flesh back together again.

The latest suggestion, though, is probably the most bizarre of the lot: bovine serum albumin, a protein found in cows’ blood. The reasons for picking it are that it is already produced on a commercial scale (it has many applications in biochemistry) and that it is sufficiently similar to human serum albumin, one of the most abundant proteins in the human body, for the immune system not to notice the difference. That reduces the risk of a wound becoming inflamed. But there is a problem. Bovine serum albumin does not come in thread form.

Eyal Zussman and his colleagues at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa think, however, that they have found a solution to this problem. They propose to use a technique called electrospinning to turn the stuff into threads that a surgeon can use.

Electrospinning works by connecting a needlelike spinneret to a high-voltage power source and releasing a charged liquid from it towards an earthed collector plate. Like a spark between a cloud and a lightning conductor, the liquid stretches out to the collector. If the molecules within it hold together while this is happening, a solid thread may form.

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