Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Create Artificial Meat
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that scientists have created the first artificial meat by extracting cells from the muscle of a live pig and putting them in a broth of other animal products where the cells then multiplied to create muscle tissue. Described as soggy pork, researchers believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to 'exercise' the muscle and while no one has yet tasted the artificial meat, researchers believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years' time. '"What we have at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue. We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there," says Mark Post, professor of physiology at Eindhoven University. "You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals." Animal rights group Peta has welcomed the laboratory-grown meat, announcing that "as far as we're concerned, if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal there's no ethical objection while the Vegetarian Society remained skeptical. "The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.""
The obvious solution is some sort of horrid electrode array.
Weak-kneed members of the public will have to be kept away from the giant culture vats, where hideous amorphous flesh lumps, studded with electrodes, thrash and strain; but they should be able to get exactly as much exercise as they need, without becoming excessively tough.
The implications for space travel are cool. The implications for feeding people who currently live with hunger could be cool. I doubt they would ever completely do away with natural meat. It will probably always be available for those who can pay for it, but if this becomes cheaper and easier to make than raising animals I could see it becoming pretty big. I would think that if the process can be refined then we could get more meat with less environmental impact.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It's an odd scenario, and I suspect it would go different ways depending on the rabbi you ask. I suspect many rabbis would still forbid meat cloned from trafe animals, but I suspect vat-beef would be acceptable. But IANAR (I am not a rabbi) so I can't say for sure.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Could it be contracted and expanded with electric shocks?
It's amazing that a vat full of electrified meat is more appetizing than current factory farms...
Do you really think the farmers of America (or any other country with lobbyists, for that matter) are going to let this happen? They're going to demonize the shit out of lab meat and complain to congress that they derk er jerbs, Then they'll be made some protected industry or subsidized by the government or some equally retarded bullshit. As I understand it the meat industry in America has a LOT of political weight to throw around.
If people stop eating actual animals, we'll be overrun with chickens in a decade. Up to our friggin' ears I tells ya! We'll have to carve our way through with machetes while wearing goalie masks.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
Not "Soylent Green" . . . The Space Merchants.
Pohl & Kornbluth's novel features a conflict between the integrated advertising/production complex that is stripping the world of resources and manipulating the populace and the benighted Consies (conservationists). The lead is kidnapped, stripped of his identity, and forced into a contract labor job. He works in an urban algea farm. Most of the goop isn't consumed by humans. It is processed into blood substitute that feeds Chicken Little, a giant pulsing wad of chicken heart cells. One of the workers slices off pieces which are packaged and shipped off for consumption.
This, in a 1952 novel by WWII veterans who worked in the advertising industry.
Cows will be around for a while. We've had several different milk substitutes around for many years and people still drink plain old milk. Work on artificial cheese has come about as far as artificial meat due to the complexities of trying to make soy proteins act like milk proteins.
One thing that is forgotten (or ignored) when discussing land use with regards to cattle is that a large majority of the rangeland in the u.s. is unsuitable for farming. In addition, certain breeds of cow can fatten up on land that would starve another breed; proper herd management can allow the animals to fatten up without destroying the soil and plants. This is why it always irks me a bit to hear people talk about how one cow uses enough land to grow wheat for 40 people or some nonsense. Here, take these seeds- go try to grow them out west in the free ranges.
This meat-in-a-vat project has a long way to go- they need to figure out how to tone the muscle, marble it with fat, configure the nutrients to make the meat not taste like a chewable vitamin, etc.
There's a taco bell near here; in 5 years I'll go sample the vat-meat.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
---
Genetic Engineering Feed @ Feed Distiller
As I said in another post, biological systems are extremely complex; too complex to accurately copy, in many cases. A banana grown from seed in a lab will taste like a banana (obviously), but what about cells from a banana replicated on an artificial matrix? Reproducing the taste, texture, density, ripening characteristics and so on of the natural fruit takes more than just a mass of cells. When something as simple as an isomer of a chemical can alter how our senses react to it, keeping every factor identical to the natural system becomes very difficult.
The real question is not whether this will be identical to natural meat, but how much it will differ and how detrimental (or indeed beneficial) those differences will be to the finished product.