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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.
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/
If it contains all the minerals, proteins, aminoacids and generally all the qualities of regular meat, I don't give a damn what's on the label.
Though, I'd think they give it some catchy name or catch phrase.
"I can't believe it's not meat!"
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
...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.
Easy: make it cheaper than the cheapest meat you can currently find in your average supermarket.
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."
Please, then, stick with your steroid-injected, BSE-ridden, hormone-packed, coloured, flavoured, seasoned, salted, vitamin-fortified, water-engorged joints of meat that are currently on the shelf.
The problem with people who *won't* buy "genetically modified", non-organic etc. foods is that they have no idea what they are *currently* eating anyway.
Growing "clean" meat in a lab sounds a good way to produce cheap meat for actually *feeding* people, e.g. developing countries, without needing to have acres of perfectly-good farmland dedicated to producing enough feed to sustain a whole herd of animals for years in order to slaughter one at a later date.
It would also work well for "essentials" meat, such as superstore value ranges for people who can only just afford it. I think I'd rather eat a generic, clean meat than the cheap offcuts of the cheapest animal, packaged in the cheapest possible way - especially if there are no possible BSE, etc. problems with it.
And meat production currently causes 18% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, and for various meats we push somewhere between 4 and 54 times the amount of energy into producing meat than we get in useful protein from the meat.
I don't give a shit what it says on the packet - and a bit of honesty would go a long way with me, in fact, rather than misleading and inaccurate statements like "organic" or "diet" or "reduced sugar" etc. - as long as it's edible. That doesn't mean I'd eat it for every meal but as a cheap way to get the energy I need to survive when I don't have much money? Bring it on.
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.
Easy: make it cheaper than the cheapest meat you can currently find in your average supermarket.
It would probably have to be as cheap as the "meat substitutes" to sell, as it would be seen by consumers as fake in the same way as the soya-based alternatives.
Maybe it's not for you. There are over 6 billion people on earth - most of whom would benefit from this.
Would they really? I would think the only people to benefit would be the people who can almost afford meat.For the rest, soya, lentils, chana, and other high-protein crops will still be the cheapest way to maintain a balanced diet.
The problem with killing an animal for meat is that a hell of a lot of resources go into growing bits you can't eat just to get a single harvest, although those bits are not without their uses; and requires a lot of land to raise them, even more so if you are looking for ethical farming methods because you have to consider psychological wellbeing rather than just physical wellbeing.
Growing meat in a factory rather than in a field means you can provide just the nutrients needed to grow the bits you actually want to eat, don't require much space and even that space which is needed (however big the VATs and supporting machinery is) can be used more efficently because you can stack the machines into a multistorey building making for a tiny footprint of land use.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
Taco Filling?
Cheers, Chris
It's an ethically interesting question. If the solution is as simple as building multi-story meat growing labs to save space, what happens if it is found out that eating this stuff gives you some kind of nano-enhanced synthetic cancer or something?
By that point, the world population is going to be quite a bit larger and even more difficult to feed through contemporary methods, meaning people will have to choose between dying of malnutrition or dying from mega-disease. And for what? Because it's responsible of us to treat our food animals ethically?
We could just forget the whole ethical treatment thing and figure out how to make giant multi-story real animal farms instead. Hell, plug them into the Matrix or something so they at least think they're just chillin' in some serene mountain meadow.
That said, this last part isn't for any of you, but for some person finding this post in a random search for "nano-enhanced synthetic cancer" decades or centuries from now. I warned them, don't blame me.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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.
Arthur C Clarke, The Food of the Gods
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
That's the thing, people go crazy about genetically modified food, think it's wrong and evil, and refuse to eat it. And yet, the same people will gladly eat fast food that has far worse stuff in it. Clearly, McDonalds is far more trustworthy than science. Sigh.
People in the world are starving not because of a lack of world food production, but political situations most of the time.
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You are talking about a hypothetical disease from a not quite ready product and use it as an argument as to why it shouldn't be used. Great logic.
By the same logic, let's assume the synthetic meat not only is cheaper to produce, it also tastes better and since it has less fat in it, is healthier. Now you get something that is both healthy and reduces the need to kill cows. Now people need to choose between dying of malnutrition or living a life without hunger. And you get ethical treatment of cows as a by-product.
Sounds great!
The fact of the matter is , there is no finished product yet, but since we are talking about taking meat from cows, culturing it and getting much more meat, I don't see why it should harbor some mystical cancer in it. Guess we should just wait-and-see.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
I would hazard a guess that most animals on the endangered list aren't there because of human over-consumption but rather habitat destruction due to increased human population. So I imagine that whilst this tech allows us to continue feeding ourselves with presumably less resources, this will confound the habitat destruction due to human overpopulation. Oh well... there's always soylent green.
Habitat destruction and human consumption go hand in hand - tigers and gorillas are hunted equally for skins and meat, as well as their habitat getting smaller. As for this technology feeding ourselves with less resources, all this appears to do is allow the human population to increase with the extra food supply - witness the increase from 4bill to over 6bill in about 40 years, with the improvements in agriculture.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
If you look at anti-GM arguments more closely, you'll find that many (most?) people are opposed to them because there are environmental risks, because one of the most common uses of GM is to allow vastly stronger herbicides / pesticides, because it enables patenting of the food supply, because terminator crops reduce farmer's negotiating power with the companies that make them, because it is unlikely that the modifications can be prevented from entering the general biosphere meaning companies are taking it upon themselves to alter plantlife for everyone without consent and because there are few if any compelling arguments in their favour. At best, they tend to be a patch on a symptom, rather than an actual solution. For example the superbly marketed "golden rice" which contains additonal vitamin A, touted as a great benefit to people in India where deficiency is not uncommon. The thing is, it didn't used to be uncommon when farmers grew a variety of crops. But now due to the pressures of the international market, famers tend to focus on a few money crops (i.e. rice) and thus people don't get the balanced diet that they used to. Slapping some vitamin A into the rice (in exchange for selling your new pesticides and crop licences) is not redress for the damage done to world farming.
You'll notice that none of this has anything to do with whether or not people eat at McDonalds (which I don't).
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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.