Lab Grown Meat Soon To Be on Your Dinner Plate
Pastor Dale Morgan
*Lab Grown Meat Soon To Be on Your Dinner Plate*
Who needs animals? It's only a matter of time before lab-grown meat
turns into the oink-less BLT.
A small batch of stem cells can be used to grow large sheets of pork.
Scientists can add vitamins, fatty acids and flavors to the meat, which
could one day be processed into food products. (Illustration by David
Helfrey)
By Ian Christe
Published in the March 2007 issue.
Popular Mechanics
It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on
factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem
cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be
hitting deli counters sooner than you think.
Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001,
scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve
in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on
moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish
muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from
the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from
biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed
for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to
small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit
out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)
Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage
giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig
stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process,"
says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It
would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat."
One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a
gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once
lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells
on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to
tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.
Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer
meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the
threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins
could be blasted into the mixture (see illustration above) or dispersed
through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage
factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of
lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing
companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a
decade. Bon appétit.