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Scientists Work To Grow Meat In a Lab
codeman07 writes "In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat. A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering 'cultured' meat. It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way... on the hoof. Growth of 'in-vitro' or cultured meat is also underway in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand."
Make higher quality meat than most of the current producers (that's not hard, we're not talking wagyu here) and do it cheaper than them (and that *really* shouldn't be hard, you're basically making beer here).
Economics will do the rest.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's got a nice ring to it, doesn't it? That would look great on the front of any packaged meat. In fact, sales will probably skyrocket. End sarcasm. I would really like to see how they would manage to market that, though.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Nice to see that Mironov is still getting some attention, but this story is at least five years old. I wrote a feature story about lab-grown meat almost six years ago for the Village Voice, which goes into much more detail than the Reuters piece: http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-07-26/art/brave-new-hamburger/
...then we can call it "Bo-vine"
It would be nice to say, one day, that the steak you are eating came from the last cow to die (be sequenced?) for human consumption. I for one welcome our cultured bovine over-done-lords.
Hunger and starvation isn't a production issue, its a distribution issue. If we're facing an inevitable meat scarcity resulting from land shortages perhaps the first solution to consider would be constructing fewer hamburger bioengineering laboratories.
What are Vegetarians going to do when this comes out? It'll throw the WHOLE damn system out of whack! "Sorry, is that a Vegetarian Friendly Steak? Great! Medium-Rare."
I can imagine that some folks who are strongly opposed to "GM" crops and animals might actually be more accepting of this technology. For one thing, there wouldn't be the concern about modified organisms polluting natural populations with their engineered genes or escaping and propagating in the wild. Furthermore, I can see fewer potential ethical arguments against culturing meat-like food in a factory compared to engineering real, live animals and raising them on factory farms.
Depends if they don't eat meat for humane reasons or because they don't like the taste.
Say it with me people, the "food crisis" is a political (and to a lesser extent, economical) problem, not a scientific problem.
You can throw a fuck load of science behind it, and it's unlikely to help as many as you think it will.
However, I do like this research, and would love to eat that kind of meat. Finally we could rid ourselves of the scourge that is... the cow.
Or to put it another way... the cow belongs in a museum!
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I'd definitely eat it :) I think an end product wouldn't differ much (from a taste and texture point of view) from a McDonald's chicken nugget with how highly processed that stuff is.
One question though. In order to get the texture right (not a chicken nugget, but a side of steak) wouldn't you need to somehow exercise the muscle tissue? Subject it to some kind of mechanical stress? This would seem to be an important part of the development of the tissue, with the cows moving about for a large part of their life (or just standing if in a factory farm).
And about the "yuck factor". Try killing, gutting and skinning your own meat :) I used to watch my grandfather skin and gut a rabbit, the smell alone was hardly tolerable.
Or even Oh-Vine!!! I'd buy that from a vending machine!
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Banana meat.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In Bubble America, Lab Meat Decays For Science.
I find it incredibly difficult to see how people concerned for the welfare of animals could possibly be against this technology. Besides this opens up other exciting culinary possibilities... like long pork! ;)
If there is no reason for human cultivation of said animals, there will be no need to keep a population of any size and the same animals will join the panda on the endangered list....
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Karma: Chameleon
In fact, they're offering a cool million bucks for the first company to bring it to market.
It seems to me that only those who abstain from meat for a particular type of religious and health reasons concerning the nature of animal flesh would have any desire to avoid meat grown in a lab. That's probably a very small subset of vegetarians.
I forgot the authors name, probably it was an Asimov story? I am not sure.
This story is set in the far future, where killing of animals has stopped, and you can have lab grown meat in every flavor (cow, lamb, chicken etc.,). One company with best flavors dominates the market, with many exotic animal flavor meat on sale.
However, a new company comes in with a meat that tastes the best, and the old leader starts losing sales.
The owner decides to do some research, and then files a suit in the parliament.
The members of parliament want to shrug off the suit, but give him a hearing.
He starts explaining with images of animals being killed that how their ancestors used to kill animals.
Many MPs faint and squirm.
Then he goes farther back to history when he shows slides of cannibalism. the entire parliament erupts, with MPs vomiting and fainting at the very thought. They want to throw him out.
At the end of the story he reveals what he has found. the new company is producing meat which tastes like human flesh. Thats why its the tastiest meat.
Anybody remember the story name or Author?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
They can save a heap on advertising with existing Kenny Everett footage
Interesting, however it still smells of a solution looking for a problem. Though the reflex might be to believe that there is no land to grow beef ( or any other meat ), due to factors such as urban sprawl, we have yet to conquer major portions of this earth with city as yet. There is still plenty of land from which to graze. It should not be a surprise, in this day and age of "everything is a potential catastrophe and you should really watch this documentary" has anyone yet mentioned that we might run out of grazing land? Have you seen the desolation which is Idaho which is mostly grazing land?
To get back to the point; We have decommissioned much of the land due to economic factors and increases in efficiency ( really the same ). I believe this kind of solution may be profitable at some point, we are at least 50 years from it, and related technology will have morphed a bit by then - so its really just speculative.
The business side of me suspects they may find it easier to say something like "zero emission pork". Funding will start to flow their way. If they can get to the point where they can claim this, the market will be ready made to the point of charging 3 - 4 times as much as organic meat. People are silly that way. At least those that are middle-middle class to upper-middle class will pay for it. The rest wont care and will buy the 'classic' type.
Wait, I am just brainstorming here... Do you think they can knock off Kobe beef? There might be an angle to this.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I'm not concerned about welfare of animals, I am concerned about taste and my health. Plus, I am concerned about my tax money going to scum who break into research labs and assault scientists, making it less likely we'll see cures to many diseases, aging and the like in my lifetime. If you have some weird semi-religious views, follow them yourself, but if I am to suffer because of you, I object.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Meat would be incredibly wasteful to produce even if they do it in a lab.
If their goal is to "feed the hungry/poor", why use meat at all? There are far cheaper/better/more ethical ways to do it.
I'm guessing the same fear inducing forces that makes folks shy away from food irradiation will take hold here. Stem cell research gets a lot of attention, even if governments aren't likely to fund it either. But research into synthesizing a food source is just as important as stem cell research, if not more important, considering what a huge issue world hunger is today.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw9s0ivfn3w saw Mitchell Joachim on TED.com speak about this last year, organic space-ships on sci-fi movies maybe in not so far away as thought.
As a "mostly vegetarian", this story leaves me somewhat confused and challenges my prejudices a bit (of which I'm fully aware of the irrationality). I don't eat meat mainly because of the 'yuck' factor as well as the sometimes questionable moral issues (and also now because I enjoy the taste of Quorn-type products). Still, this breakthrough of growing meat is interesting. No blood or anything like that required?
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Or for health reasons, or for sustainability reasons. If it's purely for ethical reasons, they'll probably welcome this. If it's for the taste, then this will be no use. For health reasons, it depends. Vat-grown meat may well be lower in fat, and if it's grown in a properly controlled environment should be completely free of diseases[1]. Sustainability is difficult to judge. It's hard to tell what the energy and environmental costs of mass-produced factory food will be, relative to other options. Finally, some people just aren't good ate metabolising meat. A significant fraction of the population stops producing the enzymes required to break down animal proteins after a few weeks of not eating meat. A (much) smaller fraction don't produce these enzymes at all.
Most vegetarians are vegetarian for some combination of two or more of these factors, with different weighting. Exactly what the combination is depends on the individual.
[1] There's a reason Judaism and Islam prohibit the eating of pig - the genetic similarity between pigs and humans makes it very easy for diseases to jump the species barrier, so the religions that prohibited eating pork had followers who were more likely to survive and breed.
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As far as I'm concerned this is old technology and called fish farming mainly, though I believe raising smaller animals, also may be an improvement over cattle in terms of carbon produced per-pound of meat.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
But we only have only a few banana plants left, their are no new banana plants anymore. We actually can not create any new species, because we can not grow any new plants anymore.
All banana come from the same few 'plants' through the process of 'cutting' (not sure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_(plant) ).
We messed that one up already.
If their is a banana-plant disease which spreads easily there will be no more banana's.
New things are always on the horizon
True
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
But it would be nice to see the excuses they come up with to resolve the cognitive dissonance. I mean, will they be honest and say "there is no ethical problem with eating vat meat, but I personally don't like the taste," or will they find some stupid excuse why it is also not ethical to eat vat meat. Could be an interesting social experiment.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
The majority of the scientists working in labs around here are just growing fat.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
They will lobby for so many regulations, restrictions, bogus studies and whatnot, so that "grown" meat won't be competitive.
They tried regulating they tried patenting, they failed to prevent all the industries involved in "traditional" transportation from becoming obsolete.
Vegetarianism isn't a bull.
FTFY
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Why? Simply why?
There is already enough food in the world to feed all the people. Problem is just that most of the food is harvested and sold to developed countries and not shared between all nations.
The problem is caused by commercial and political greed... not by problems to manufacture enough food.
Spam..... Spam... spam... spam.....
despair?
And FTA, he's got no funding. I don't see why venture capitalists or those 99%-ers give to stuff like this. Vaccines are nice and all, but getting people enough food to live and not killing the world would be much more beneficial. I've been dreaming of these quivering walls of meat for years -- I even wrote about it in a science-fiction class -- but I don't see it happening before I die, and I'm not even 30. This kind of thing is just like genetically modified crops, it's just to strange for some people to get their heads around. I wish they would wake up and see that what they are eating is a horrific Mengelesque monstrosity borne from greed, and worse than any lab-grown chow could ever be.
when it comes to our food, most of us, even the most flaming liberal, are paleolithic conservatives. look at the hoopla over GM crops: GM crops are of course, utterly harmless, and in fact do wonderful things: orange rice (vitamin A in rice), salt resistant crops, crops that can grow with less water etc. but talk to most people about GM crops, and they act like someone is trying to get them eat radioactive botulism. its completely irrational
likewise, this meat-from-a-vat is THE answer to food crises and vegetarian ethical problems with killing animals. and yet i have a sneaky sinking feeling people will react to it the same way they act to GM food. which, again, is irrational, but i am beginning to get the idea that people, when it comes to their food, are mostly reactionary conservatives
a lot of us have open minds, but most of us have closed stomachs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you eat meat, and there is no animal it belonged to, will it still upset PETA?
Dilbert already called it. He invented the Tomeato. It didn't go down well!
There are 2 types of people in this world. Those who understand ternary and those who don't.
Do the rest? You mean reduce costs as much as possible until what you're left with is junk? Grow the "meat" using waste by-products from other industries? Allow as much bacteria as possible as long as you can drug or irradiate it away, and add artificial colorings and flavorings to cover it up? I don't think it will be long until "garbage in, garbage out" becomes the norm, followed by a "our cultured meat is made more organically" reaction, which is then followed by major manufacturers, starting the cycle over again.
What about vegans and vegetarians? Since this meat (if I am understanding this correctly) does not come directly from an animal, and rather is GROWN much like a vegetable/fruit (in a sense), will we now open up a new avenue to our vegan friends? Nah, probably not. More fake-meat for me!
I'm pretty sure this is what starts the zombie apocalypse. Ed: Any zombies out there? Shaun: Don't say that! Ed: What? Shaun: That! Ed: What? Shaun: The zed-word. Don't say it! Ed: Why not? Shaun: Because it's ridiculous! Ed: All right... are there any out there, though? Shaun: I can't see any. Maybe it's not as bad as all that. Shaun: Oh, no, there they are.
Foot placed squarely in mouth since 1983.
But we only have only a few banana plants left, their are no new banana plants anymore.
In other words: We have no new banana plants today!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
***Dr. Mironov has taken myoblasts -- embryonic cells that develop into muscle tissue -- from turkey and bathed them in a nutrient bath of bovine serum***
There are several problems here. I don't grow meat in the lab, but I have grown many types of cells, human heart, FSC, CHO and currently mouse keratinocytes, fibroblasts and skin stem cells. Forget about them long enough and you get your first little layer of meat on the bottom of the tissue flask. (As an aside, growing human heart cells is amazing, you can add adrenaline and they start to beat in sync).
The reason this will not currently work is the cost, it is in the media, which for eukaryotes requires FCS (usually) to grow. FCS is calf serum, you can read how it's made on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum). FCS costs money, comes from animals and can be a disease vector.
The answer in every article I've ever read from people growing meat is that serum free media will be designed so that eukaryotic cells will be able to live and grow without animal products. This is rubbish, if it was so easy to make a perfect 'defined' media (as a media without FCS is called), that works well with eukaryotic cells, all of us working with animal cell culturing would use it. It would be a far bigger breakthrough for the biotech and pharma industries than it would be for the meat makers. It would make the inventor rich and give them a Nobel.
Secondly you have running costs, people see the idea of growing meat in a vat as like growing beer in a vat. This is bullshit, beer is made from tough, resilient yeast. And beer manages to have QC problems.
Meat is made from eukaryotic cells, which are a lot more complex and a lot more sensitive than yeast. If you want to know what growing meat in a vat would be like, look at pharma, recombinant protein products. Stuff like Factor VIII. It's worth more than it's weight in gold. Contamination is a much bigger problem, media costs are higher and all hardware costs a ton.
Economies of scale would bring down prices, but not that much, it all just COSTS a lot. And the FCS problem will never be economy-of-scaled away. It's the elephant in the room that nobody in these stupid interviews ever mentions.
in his Terro-Human Future (available in an omnibus edition here: http://down.4dots.com/30100/Terro-Human%20Future%20History%20Omnibus%20-%20H.%20Beam%20Piper.epub ).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I just love how all vegetarians get lumped together as some whack jobs who feel so bad for the wee little animals. Just yesterday a clerk at the Walmart made a remark to my wife about how "God intended for us to eat animals." Like he was judging her when it was him who asked about the lack of meat in the grocery cart. Who the hell knows what God wants? Obviously the 300 lb man who can't even stand up to swipe some groceries knows exactly what God wants us to eat.
Personally I would never eat this lab grown meat. I'll continue to be fit and live a perfectly healthy life without any meat.
Staple plants (like corn, rice, wheat and potatoes, etc) are an excellent source of fiber, vitamins some minerals and a moderate source of calories. They generally lack enough protein and fats. You must remember that a human being as essential Amino Acids AND essential fatty acids which must both be satisfied through diet.
Vegetarians generally have a difficult time fullfilling these requierments without very carefull diets. These diets include a wide range of species which is often difficult and expensive to maintain and well outside the budget of most developing nations. A healthy vegetarian diet can be more expensive and land/resource intensive than a diet with a few (say 6) ounces of meat a day. In addition, there are vitamins which are not available from any plant source (B12 and others) and must be provided in pill form which may be an impossibility for poor nations...
A true Vegan diet is a biologic impossibility
Finally, meat is much more calorically dense than almost any plant matter. If you have to SHIP food, it is acutally easier to ship calories as meat than almost any plant material.
I'll bet Taco Bell is following this research very closely.
Yes, of course. What makes eating meat unethical is the support for factory farming, in which animals greatly suffer. (I recommend reading Jonathan Safran Foers Eating Animals)
If there is no animal, there is no pain, and everything is fine (except that we're already eating so much meat that it's unhealthy).
In fact, PETA promised One Million Dollars for the first commercially viable growing of artificial meat.
Also, what ethical problem is there is eating meat ?!?
The basic premises most people have is:
a) human interests have to be considered when weighting different options of actions
b) non-human animal rights & interests do NOT to be considered in an equal way as human interests
These premises lead to the conclusion, that there must be a fundamental difference between humans and non-human animals. Throughout history, philosophers have searched for such a distinction. Long story short, they failed.
Take "the ability to talk" for instance. Long believed to be an uniquely human feature, we now know that at least some other animals communicate as well (using a different language of course).
Take another example, the ability to do complex math. Fine, non-human animals can't do that, but neither do all humans, right? When we're saying that only humans can do complex math and therefor deserve to be considered, doesn't that mean we should not give rights to those, who are unable to do that? You might respond that every human (e.g. a child) being may evolve to someone who can do complex math, but that's simply not true. There are serious illnesses which disables some children to do math for all their live.
So, what's that magical difference between humans and animals? Many modern philosophers have came to the conclusion, that there isn't such a big difference after all, and that we should consider animal interest's equally to human interests.
It should be obvious, that factory farming greatly violates animal interests not to be tortured.
I recommend reading Animal Rights by Peter Singer; unlike popular belief, Slashdot comments are not sufficient to give philosophical debates the space they deserve.
I'm vegan for primarily ethical and environmental reasons. If this avoids both, then I would have no problem with the idea of it, and I'm sure others like me would be the same.
Having said that, I've been meat-free for so long now (17 years), that the very idea of eating it is rather repulsive to me, so I wouldn't touch the stuff. Not to mention I'd be wary of eating anything created in a lab.
Sorry.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
http://xkcd.com/418/ s/cook/grow/
Yum!
Apparently the meat blob tastes terrible until they figure out it "needs exercise" like real cows and hook it up to electrodes that give it electric shocks at regular intervals overnight.
He's developing the Wraith pathogen that is used for growing war ships that are capable of regeneration.
Quorn.......
They already have this and it's name is Quorn...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Eat less, or no, meat.
Cattle ranching is the #1 cause of deforestation in the Amazon. Unless it is curtailed (ideally by a decline in demand for unsustainable meat, but military action should also be an option), there will be no Amazon in a few years.
you had me at #!
...the canned stuff, not the Nigerian pills.
Table-ized A.I.
Here is a thought... If this tech can be perfected AND proven safe then establish PERMANENT colonies on the Moon and Mars will be ONE STEP CLOSER!
"It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available"
Hello? Time to wake up and face the real problem... we have waaaaay too many people. Pretty much every problem we face as a species has its roots in overpopulation. Humans are not nearly cool enough that we need 6 billion of them. Probably a couple hundred million is plenty.
We better do something about the problem, before the problem takes care of itself in the form of pandemics, famine, etc.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm ... The U.S. has 2.3 billion acres of land. However, 375 million acres are in Alaska and not suitable for agricultural production. The land area of the lower 48 states is approximately 1.9 billion acres. ... About 349 million acres in the U.S. are planted for crops. This is the equivalent of about four states the size of Montana. Four crops -- feeder corn (80 million acres), soybeans (75 million acres), alfalfa hay (61 million acres) and wheat (62 million acres) -- make up 80 percent of total crop acreage. All but wheat are primarily used to feed livestock. The amount of land used to produce all vegetables in the U.S. is less than 3 million acres. ... Range and Pasture Land- Some 788 million acres, or 41.4 percent of the U. S. excluding Alaska, are grazed by livestock. This is an area the size of 8.3 states the size of Montana. Grazed lands include rangeland, pasture and cropland pasture. More than 309 million acres of federal, state and other public lands are grazed by domestic livestock. Another 140 million acres are forested lands that are grazed. ... Despite all the hand wringing over sprawl and urbanization, only 66 million acres are considered developed lands. This amounts to 3 percent of the land area in the U.S., yet this small land base is home to 75 percent of the population. ... "
"The great bulk of agricultural production goes toward forage production used primarily by livestock. A small shift in our diet away from meat could have a tremendous impact on the ground in terms of freeing up lands for restoration and wildlife habitat. It would also reduce the poisoning of our streams and groundwater with pesticides and other residue of modern agricultural practices.
Similar to suggested above, when you include grain production for animal feed to grazing land, literally half the land in the USA is devoted to animal product production, according to the movie this is a preview of:
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
Note that, overall, people in the USA would be healthier if they ate a lot less animal products and processed foods (including sugar and refined grains) and a lot more vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains, and a few key supplements like vitamin D, B12, iodine, etc.). But the agricultural subsidies are the opposite of what we need for good health in the USA.
See also:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is like turning gold into lead.
He's turning bovine serum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum which costs about $800 per kilogram, http://products.invitrogen.com/ivgn/en/US/adirect/invitrogen?cmd=catDisplayStyle&catKey=100301&filterDispName=Mammalian+Cell+Culture&filterType=1&OP=filter&filter=ft_1701%2Ff_188301*&_bcs_=H4sIAAAAAAAAAMWQ22rDMAyGn8Y3CwlODFt6maWklMIY67Z746iJwYfgQ0LefvK6lrGV3Q6EfiRb%0A8vc7Lwmtn53towg%2BI9V9dgQ3SwH%2Bj%2F4YwkRYQ6oOY1mWQppZBmcHMIWwGpteBkCJHhMYTKPVqXHZ%0AmHPT59eNVddMk5KCB2mNL8agFb5CKpaC1sFFSDV9oCglLXFgs0G9w7IFpbI2qhAdJE6uEe0xe3Xc%0A%2BBOItDF7AY5o4Rf69EXzk581NcVjOQ%2Fmwv92xMR76XBlOroOENYJ3RO23b%2FvntDBVvpJ8bXlAQbr%0AViTC5gFWvPHJ%2FN3YiSt%2F2xlqSSk7W8R%2Fivqf2c80t%2BA%2FAApkysVCAgAA into meat, which sells for about $5-10 a kilogram.
Bovine serum is a byproduct of the commercial meat industry. So he first has to farm the animals, and slaughter them, to get the serum, to grow a much smaller quantity of meat.
Dilbert already made this: It's called the tomeato (to-meat-o). Grown on a plant that really likes to live in mud (Elbonia), shaped as a brick for practical purposes (transport, storage etc.), and with the texture of a black/white cow. It was all done in good intentions to make Elbonians eat the tomeato instead of mud, but of course the result is a total collapse of the Elbonian society structure. Poor people started to build their houses using tomeatoes instead of mud because it was cheaper :-)
See for yourself
Chicken Little
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1002
Since the process of production involves chitosan the resulting "meat" would be be very likely impossible to certify as kosher. Wikipedia tells me that "Commercial chitosan is derived from the shells of shrimp and other sea crustaceans" so even if the original turkey mytoblast cells and the "bovine serum" cells were sourced from animals which were slaughtered kosher, the use of ingredients derived from crustaceans in the manufacturing process fouls the resultant food product from my perspective. This is too bad because where my family lives there is no legal source of kosher meat. If this type of process could be done without crustacean derived chitosan using a coffee machine sized appliance, it might be a real boon to small Jewish communities around the world.
Note: IANAR and there is currently no authoritative consensus on the kashrut status of any synthesized meat products.