If you visit Iceland’s Keflavik Airport, you may see a huge advertisement showing a shirtless man holding a baby. The man’s torso and arms contain large areas of pucker-patterned skin. He looks half-aquatic, like a variation on Aquaman.
As Hakai Magazine notes,
The baby-holding man, Pétur Oddsson, is a power station worker. In 2020, he endured a 60,000-volt electrical shock; it left almost half his body covered in deep thermal burns that charred layers of his skin off. Such deep and extensive burns can be fatal—skin damaged in this way can’t make new cells to regenerate, and infections can easily set in. But Oddsson’s life was spared by an ingenious invention: grafted cod skin—7,000 square centimeters of it. The procedure adorned Oddsson’s upper body with the permanent, distinct imprint of scales.
Oddsson’s cod skin grafts are a marvel of medical technology. But they also represent something else: the manifestation of an unusual and ambitious experiment in environmental efficiency. The skin grafts are just one of a slew of products—including Omega-3 capsules, cold virus pretreatment sprays, and dog snacks—made from what was once Iceland’s cod catch detritus. They come largely from the efforts of 100% Fish—a project spurred by the incubator Iceland Ocean Cluster in collaboration with research institutes and private companies to determine how to repurpose byproducts from the country’s US $2-billion seafood sector.
So far, enterprising Icelanders have unlocked uses for almost 95 percent of a cod—a pretty recent jump forward. In 2003, people only knew what to do with about 40 percent of the fish….the 100% Fish Project has created jobs and [expanded] domestically produced goods. It has also…provided lower-impact fish meal for a burgeoning aquaculture industry….A company called Nordic Fish Leather is upcycling farmed salmon skin into leather for accessories and another, Primex, is extracting chitosan from the shells of wild-caught Atlantic northern shrimp, which can be used as a blood-clotting agent.
The cod skin grafts are the brainchild of Fertram Sigurjonsson, a chemist and the founder of biotech company Kerecis, which is part of the 100% Fish Project. The grafts come in several sizes—wide strips, for large wounds; glove shapes, for hands; and granules, which act like putty in smaller wounds—and have been used to treat thousands of burn victims, diabetes patients with open wounds, and women with infected C-sections. Doctors can perform some of these procedures with pigskin grafts, but those are harvested from animals engineered for the purpose. The fish skin, conversely, comes from cod caught for human consumption by fishermen in Sigurjonsson’s northwestern hometown of Isafjordur. (Fishermen who also own valuable shares in his company.)
