The Atlantic provides a look inside Google’s life sciences lab, where the company makes human skin

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dzI_azZEGI]

The Atlantic got to take an exclusive look inside Google’s medical sciences lab, where the company is developing crazy new technologies like a FitBit-style armband paired with a nanoparticle-laden pill that can detect cancer—a technology first noted as being in development by 9to5Google last June.

Also, they’re making fake arms out of real skin. Yes, real human skin.

The arms are designed as models to help determine how light passes through skin. Various skin tones and other specifics are replicated using some skin-like materials, but also through the inclusion of real human flesh.

Once that data has been collected, beams of light can be used to read information from “nanoparticles” introduced through an ingestible pill. Those nanoparticles are designed to watch onto cancerous cells and report back to a wristband if they find anything amiss.

Google doesn’t have a time-table for when such technology might become widely available, but Google Life Sciences chief Andrew Conrad says he hopes it will be “years, not decades.”

You can check out The Atlantic‘s tour of Google’s Life Sciences lab in the video embedded above.