(Jan. 21st, 2010) Star date 4315.5. After a long day at work you finally come home and all you can think of is a juicy mammoth steak. You go to your incubator (home edition) that the guys from the company installed in your apartment last week and take out the freshly grown muscle tissue. Yummy, you think, now let’s peel some potatoes… Wishful thinking? This might not be science fiction for too much longer.
Curently, several labs worldwide have sunk their collective teeth deeply into the project of producing meat in vitro or, to put it into more animal rights friendly terms, meat that has never been part of a complete, living animal. Even though scientists are not yet at the stage of selling it to the public, they’re closer than ever before. In November last year, researchers from the Netherlands announced that they had managed to grow meat in the lab using undifferentiated muscle cells (myoblasts) from a live pig. This announcement was very much to the taste of animal rights organisation PETA, who promised to pay US$1 million to the company who can bring in vitro chicken onto the market by 2012. According to PETA, the amount of prize money equals the number of chickens killed for food in the USA every year.
The idea of growing artificial meat has been around for some time already. First, space agency NASA tried to get some in vitro turkey on the plate for long-term astronauts in space, then, in 2000, scientists of the Applied BioScience Research Consortium brought home the bacon, so to speak; they produced the first edible form of artificial meat, fish fillets grown out of goldfish cells. Captain Igloo (aka. Captain Birds Eye for the English) was not amused!
Recent advances from Dutch scientists, including Mark Post from the University of Eindhoven, might lead us to a whole new era of more healthy and environmentally friendly food as lab-grown meat contains no saturated fats or germs and should’ve been cultivated without hormones or antibiotics and the release of copious amounts of methane. The project is beefed up by funds from the Dutch government, who chipped in US$4 million, and the Dutch sausage maker, Stegeman.
There is, however, one major problem, which is so far a little hard to stomach for the scientists. The in vitro muscle tissue resembles more Jell-O than real muscle and, therefore, has to get in shape by exercising. How this is best done, is currently worked out in the labs. And, even though the meat might look good enough to eat, scientists are not yet allowed to take a mouthful.
If the above already sounds a little odd, then get ready for this: it would also be possible to grow meat from extinct animals or you could even grow your own muscle cells for personal consumption, theoretically, that is!
So, will in vitro meat end world hunger or stop the greenhouse effect? In a few years, the world will see whether or not the Dutch researchers have perhaps bitten off a little more than they could chew.
Kathleen Gransalke