Question: Are there any synthetic materials which can grow (whether it could be used for repairs or as an alternative for skin grafts etc.)?

Bernard Ennis answered on 9 Nov 2015:

There are materials which can self-heal in that they can repair themselves in case of light damage. I doubt we will ever see a material which can truly grow in the way that the body does, because the body is a complete system and not just one material. As for skin grafts and organs etc, there is work on trying to grow skin and organs synthetically in the laboratory based on special types of cells taken from the body. These stem cells are used by the body to create all of the other types of cells and if we can copy that in the lab, then we should be able to make skin on-demand. What would be really cool is if we can take stem cells from a person to grow a replacement organ which would be genetically identical and therefore wouldn’t be rejected by the body. Since this isn’t really my field, I don’t know how close we are to making this a reality, but I think (and hope) that this will be possible one day.