I'll Have My Burger Petri-Dish Bred, With Extra Omega-3

How do you prefer your beef? Certified Angus, grass fed, or culled from a petri dish? That last option may be coming your way soon, courtesy of New Harvest, a loosely knit consortium of international scientists who are investigating an innovative new way of satisfying the world’s craving for meat. They plan to grow it in a lab—no animals required.

Lab-grown meat is “less unnatural than raising farm animals in intensive confinement systems, injecting them with synthetic hormones, and feeding them artificial diets made up of anti­biotics and animal wastes.” Known as in vitro or cultured meat, the end product, grown from stem cells, could alleviate environmental and health concerns associated with most animal protein (not to mention moral qualms about eating animals), making it the cut of choice.

To a certain extent, in vitro meat has already been produced hundreds of times in labs around the world, as stem cell researchers crank out bits of artificial muscle and connective tissue, hoping to mend weak hearts or reverse muscular dystrophy.

Currently, most research into lab-grown meat comes from biologists in the Netherlands. The Dutch government is funding the work. Henk Haagsman, one of the lead scientists on the Dutch project and a member of the New Harvest advisory board, says the key to making in vitro meat is to get stem cells to divide repeatedly, ultimately spawning billions of offspring; those daughter cells would then fuse and mature into a uniform, solid block. So far, Haagsman has created a small layer of fused meat cells—something akin to the world’s thinnest slice of bologna—grown from a single pig-muscle cell.



VTPP 434
Susan Vanderzyl

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/oct/22-i.ll-have-my-burger-petri-dish-bred