Slashdot Mirror
Engineering the $325,000 Burger
Dr. Mark Post hopes to bring the dream of cultured meat one step closer to reality when he unveils his high tech hamburger in London. The five ounce burger is composed of 20,000 strips of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory at a cost of $325,000 (provided by an anonymous donor.) From the article: "The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world — including potential sources of research funds — that so-called in-Vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality."
You get lots of fries for that price
(And your coke in a real glass, not a plastic cup)
Or should I wait until after I order a McVitro?
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Reality is affordability.
The Japanese will love this - while it's expensive. When it gets cheap, expect McDonald's to start quietly using it...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
the nanny-state mentality that is gripping government first world countries will soon forbid the growing of beef-life tissue because of its increasing the risk of arterial clogging, etc.
the second is a quality consideration, I will accept nothing less than the flavor and texture of the very finest beef cuts in vat cultured tissue. else I will continue to support the inhumane raising and slaughtering of cattle. Also, I reserve the right to throw tissue cultures on the grill over charcoal, concerns of carcinogens be damned.
Only engineered Neal is available - they ate the real one already.
Does this meat technically qualify as vegetarian, as no animal was killed to make it?
Only on
Reminds me of the Axolotol tanks and the slig meat that's considered a delicacy in that universe.
Q: How can you know why somebody is a vegan?
A: Don't worry. He'll tell you.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
When I dream of a juicy hamburger its sure the hell ain't cultured meat.
From Better Off TED: http://youtu.be/ezEMnzmDYZU
i seen enough of this planet and i want off
The solution is self-evident.
The idea is to create meat that requires less resources and no slaughter. GMO agriculture increases crop yields, just like selective breeding has for millennia. Stop being a crank or just kill yourself.
Why are you so negative about lab grown meat? No more animal suffering, a lot less impact on the environment, what's not to like?
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
and a delicious source of free-range meat products.
The price is perfectly realistic, really; in fact, it's quite well thought-out. By the time these are ready for large-scale roll-out, inflation will have caught up nicely.
GMO agriculture by a fascist system (Monsanto and govt) HFCS in one form or another is in almost everything, now this (lab grown meat), i seen enough of this planet and i want off
The upside is that you're still going to be able to have burgers without having to figure out how to herd cattle in space.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
If they followed the lead of other UK burger manufacturers and they used horse meat instead.
Is it vegetarian approved?
The incoherency of all that makes me wonder if they really are putting something in our food.
I guess both of you have a point. I can summarize the issue stating the obvious: the techniques (on vitro beef, GMO, etc) are not the problem; the problem consists of the organizations controlling these techniques (Monsanto, etc). And the problem is this: monopoly.
Just talk to the dolphins, they're almost ready to launch.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
What's not to like is, it's grown outside an animal. Even with live animals, there is a tremendous variation in meat quality, both in the ways it appeals to you and in the nutritional value, depending on a great many factors. How did they live and what did they eat? I am somewhat skeptical that these miniscule chunks of flesh, brought up in isolation on some sort of artificial broth, are likely to entirely reproduce the flavor, texture, or nutritional value of the real thing. Maybe some decade real soon now. Maybe.
Ted: "We're talking about growing meat in a lab without cows."
Linda: "Ugh! That's creepy!... Right?... Oh, I see, we're doing that."
Artificial Beef Taste Tester: "It tastes... familiar..."
Ted: "Beef?"
Taste Tester: "No..."
Linda: "Chicken? We'll take chicken."
Taste Tester: Shakes his head
Ted: "What does it taste like?"
Taste Tester: "Despair?"
Ted: "Is it possible it just needs salt?"
Taste Tester: Shakes his head very slowly
Better Off Ted, Season 1 Episode 2
Wouldn't it be easier to engineer and process, for example, soy beans to make it taste more like ground beef?
I feel that eating meat which was not once running through the fields, robs me of the deep sense of superiority I get from being at the top of the food chain. Who knows how long we may remain here (alien invasion or pending zombie apocalypse)? I say let's enjoy our dominant position while we have it and not waste our time on defenseless lab meat.
Unless and until we get unpatented GMO crops, and no more lawsuits against farmers who got cross-pollination from GMO crops, I'll be against GMO crops, regardless of its other merits or non-merits. Buying GM crops means supporting an abusive industry.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
First they replaced my natural flavor with imitation, and I ate it anyways.
Second they replaced sugar with corn syrup, and I kept on getting fatter.
Then they replaced my natural crops with genetic modified crops, and I kept eating.
Now they are trying to replace my natural cow grown meat with vat grown meat? WTF?
When will this stop? We are very close to losing bacon in the name of progress.
Think of the bacon, this must be stopped.
Be seeing you...
...a cup of Kopi Luwak with it.
Obviously lab meat will have to live up to the standards of real meat. But once it's edible, I don't see any other complications.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Why are you so negative about lab grown meat? No more animal suffering, a lot less impact on the environment, what's not to like?
What's not to like? Well the I don't like the lack of animal suffering. The suffering makes the meat taste better.
Good news for supermarkets:
No horses were harmed in the production of this BEEFburger...
Does eating synthetic human tissue make you a cannibal? (cue the creepy cannibalistic zombie apocalypse music in 3... 2.... 1...)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Haven't you seen the pictures of featherless chickens on crackbook with the claim that KFC can't call it chicken any more because it's grown in a vat? :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
All in all I Prefer the $100 Kobe Beef Burger.
Growing the meat on artificial broth in a controlled environment will allow much better control over the flavor, texture, and nutritional value than growing the meat on a cow in an uncontrolled environment.
It'll take some time to get it exactly right, but in an ideal world you should end up getting much better quality and consistency from cultured meat than you could from a cow.
kosher?
...... who gets to eat it?
Remember kids: What's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
How much worse can it be than what you get at McDonald's?
You are welcome on my lawn.
and a delicious source of free-range meat products.
No, you have that backwards. This meat is "range-free," not "free-range."
Shimata, I just realized how the food companies are going to market this.
Don't jump to conclusions. Every attempt I've ever heard of at cultured meat, or any other tissue for that matter, has been highly dependent upon nutrient solutions derived from living animals. Many are based on animal blood, some on liver or other tissue. I'd bet far FAR more animals went into this over prices burger than would have been necessary for the McDonalds my family had for lunch yesterday.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
I would be concerned at the increased unemployment as farmers, abattoir workers and everyone else involved in the production of real meat are replaced by lab technicians and scientists.
On a more personal note, will the taste be the same? For medical reasons, I must follow a gluten free diet - and despite wider availability and better quality of food than in the past, they still haven't been able to come up with something exactly the same "real" bread. Why would it be any easier to replicate the taste of a fine steak?
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
If vat grown becomes a reality. Beef production produces huge amounts of methane which is a big contributor to climate change. You don't have to be animal welfare nut to advocate for this development.
Food manufactured in a lab for factory production. This is even further down the spectrum of the absurdity of processed foods and the exact opposite of what we need. This will be far more energy intensive and economically controlled.
Stick with natural, pasture raised meat.
Actually, the suffering makes the meat taste worse :
Here the animal is subjected to severe anxiety and fright caused by manhandling, fighting in the pens and bad stunning techniques. All this may result in biochemical processes in the muscle in particular in rapid breakdown of muscle glycogen and the meat becoming very pale with pronounced acidity (pH values of 5.4-5.6 immediately after slaughter) and poor flavour.
And it's exactly what I thought of when reading this.
One can only hope.
Plus it's kind of icky.
Carol vs. Ghost
The organizations controlling the techniques are only allowed to do so because government and citizens allow them to get away with it. It's not necessary to the advancement of food technology. It's actually really weird that we're allowing this to happen with fucking food, while we don't tolerate monopolies on technology that is far less essential to life. Like, we investigated MS for monopoly and anticompetitive practices, but no one is going to starve to death if windows is the only OS out there.
http://baconsalt.com/
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Carnivorous animals usually feed on grazing animals (not that they don't "eat their own" from time to time, they *usually* don't have a steady diet of eating other carnivorous animals). I've seen this explained that these animals are instinctively choosing foods that contain nutrients they need. In this case, they are getting the nutrients second hand through animals that eat lots of grass.
Why so negative about lab grown meat? Because meat is more than just proteins. There are other nutrients in it. What the animal eats that you eat, makes a difference, believe it or not.
With the finding of vitamins, it was thought that diet didn't really matter; we can just take a pill if our food is missing some nutrient. How is that working out for us?:
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
i can see ... see ... seeeee..... yes!: a McMars drive-thru!
side note: it WILL blend!
I used to work in a company that grows animal tissue cultures. You certainly CAN grow lots of tissue types without horse serum or any animal-related products. In fact, lots of lab protocols require that.
Cyberax is correct, and the main driving force behind the shift has been the FDA; they've been pushing hard for chemically-defined culture media, with elimination of serum-type materials whenever possible. Although bio-pharm materials are closely examined for both known and unknown pathogens, their concern is that animal derived substances may yet harbor pathogens too novel to be detected by conventional methods. We're used to defined media for microbes being simple and cheap, but the ones used for mammalian cells are more complex and frequently must be tailored to each particular cell lineage, with comparatively exorbitant costs.
In any case, if you've got the capability to do large-scale mammalian cell culture, you'd be a fool to use it for a product that sells for dollars-per-pound, when that capacity could be put to work performing contract manufacturing of bio-pharmaceuticals that sell for for thousands-of-dollars-per-gram.
You left out the best part: tastier meat. Theoretically, McDonalds could start using filet mignon for its burgers because it's just as cheap as any other type of beef to grow in a vat. Panda Express could start using artificial panda meat if they wanted to. No longer would we be limited by the logistics of animal husbandry!
That said, early generation vat-grown meat is going to be expensive and have inferior taste. You'll also have purists who only want authentic prime black angus tenderloin. But, as a near carnivore, I'm looking forward to what the future of this technology will bring. (Especially because I'm skeptical about the future population levels of various delicious fish and want to ensure I can enjoy them in my old age.)
No more animal suffering, a lot less impact on the environment, what's not to like?
One of the reason this stuff is so expensive is that it's grown in a soup of fetal calf serum. Extracting the serum from fetal calves is generally a terminal procedure, and my guess is there's at least one calf worth of serum used to grow that many cells.
Lots of tissue media (and enzymes) are so expensive because there's no large-scale demand for them, so vendors have to recoup their R&D by jacking up the prices. I know for a fact that a couple of very expensive enzymes used in preparation of DNA libraries are sold with 20x markup. Yet it's barely enough to get even because it took tens of millions of dollars to develop them.
Wouldn't the large scale of production bring the price to weight ratio down regardless of what was being produced?
From the article: "starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse."
There was also a mention that there's an ongoing need for animal products to produce the growth medium.
There's work going on to be animal independent, but for now this meat is also slightly murderous.
Not A Sig
Missing deadlines, much?
Anonymous McDonor?
Unless and until we get unpatented GMO crops
Monsanto's first genetically engineered soy goes off patent next year. However, since conventionally bred crops are commonly patented, do you oppose conventional breeding as well?
and no more lawsuits against farmers who got cross-pollination from GMO crops
Good news, that never happened. No one has even been sued for cross pollination, although they have been sued for doing things like spraying Round-Up on seeds from cross pollinated plants to get the transgenic traits without paying for them. The difference is like the difference between finding a stray DVD on the ground and burning off a thousand copies.
Criteria met.
I think I'd rather have my burger from a Santa Gertrudis steer raised in Texas, California or Hawaii.
... although they have been sued for doing things like spraying Round-Up on seeds from cross pollinated plants to get the transgenic traits without paying for them.
So you're saying that it's ok to sue somebody for using a chemical that they would normally use on non-GM crops, just because the seeds happen to be cross-pollinated? Does that still stand if the farmer has no idea that the seeds were cross-pollinated? My dad is pretty intelligent, but I doubt he's got the knowledge or equipment to determine whether the seeds will cause him to be sued.
The difference is like the difference between finding a stray DVD on the ground and burning off a thousand copies.
Oh, I get it, you're saying that spraying Round-Up on a single cross-pollinated seed causes them to multiply massively.*
* One ridiculous comment deserves another.
If you think that any industrial process for turning solar energy into meat can beat the efficiency of the grass/cow combination honed over millions of years, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.
At any rate, this must be the most stupid approach for fighting hunger presented so far since processing vegetable matter into meat is quite inefficient. Starving people are better served with rice than hamburgers.
The cause is a good one as it's ethically and environmentally the right direction but to succeed the end game has to be something that unquestioningly tastes, feels, looks, cooks, etc. like good quality meat as we have enough substitutes that don't hit every button. Once we get there we will have more land for vegetable matter and may have a chance of feeding the world's population with enough variety, including protein, to keep them healthy. However, we must learn from history, both recent and less so, that if we let money be the most significant factor in deciding the quality of our food and who gets to eat what, then it will not deliver what's needed. This has to be government funded without patents, licences, tie-ins etc. so that the best product will rise to the top and not the best margin.
A good book in its own right, it has a great scene where the protagonist is given real meat to eat instead of the vat grown he's eaten all his life. He's quite horrified at the thought of having eaten "dead meat". A small but interesting part of the story.
I happen to have some of this myself.
You can but in anything and claim anything - EU is proof of that - just don't get caught.Rat sold as Lamb in China.
Rotten pork, treated in Vietnam- refreshed, as they say.
Pressure rendered meat off bones, and unspeakable chunky bits go into pies.. gota be cheaper than petre dish flesh.
Not only do you eat McDonald's for lunch, you bring your family there?
Do you want your children to be obese and have health problems?
You won't, because law makers will outlaw it being listed on the package, and that is the give away. "If they aren't doing anything wrong, then they have nothing to hide"; Isn't that the phrase law makers and law enforcers always try to use on us?
With all the Bullshit around Pink Slime, Monsanto and other GMO products in recent years, there is no way I would ever touch it. I will start going directly to a butcher.
I bet those that make the stuff (and know all the details of how it's made) won't be eating it on a regular basis.
Now you can enjoy Soylent Red, Yellow and the new Soylent Green.
InVitroBurger is PEOPLE ! ! !
Where did the original sample come from? Was the animal completely destroyed or was it just a small biopsy that would grow back. Was the animal awake? Was it properly numbed at least? Finally... did the animal give consent? Can an animal give consent?
See! The real ethical vegetarians won't eat lab grown beef. They will eat lab grown human! it's the only meat source than can give consent!
And hacking up an animal that has been killed with a bolt gun after living in less-than-idyllic conditions and pumped full of antibiotics isn't? Future generations might see eating animals as bizarrely icky.
Flamebait? "Hey, that guy's talkin' bad about Earthlings — get him!"
Stop being a crank or just kill yourself.
Is killing himself the way by which he becomes uncranked, or do you want him to see the error of his ways (and perhaps shed a single tear) as he squeezes the trigger?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
1. Meat tastes terrible. It's the fat that tastes good. Go make a burger from steak tartar, no cheese, if you don't believe me.
2. Red meat, because of carnetines and gut bacterial, may be causing the lion's share of heart disease problems.
So we've been fooled by science fiction for 80 years. Meat is a useless substrate to convey delicious fats to the mouth, and give you something to chew on while savoring them. And it's a hideously unhealthy substrate.
Some tofu burger, but with beef fat, is probably the way to go. Lack of fats is why tofu, like plain baked taters, taste...boring, to be kind to both.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Not only do you eat McDonald's for lunch, you bring your family there?
Do you want your children to be obese and have health problems?
Do poor people simply dislike money?
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Kids on this planet starve because the IMF won't drop interest rates on loans given to western installed dictators - who are now dead or in exile. There are some 30m homeless in the US and this is qualified as news? An expensive burger? I'm not trolling here - I'm seriously saying fuck you - I hope you fucking choke.
AFAIK, most of the flavor comes from the fat, not the muscle. Add some lab-grown fat to a nice soy-burger and I bet it will taste a lot more meaty than lab-grown muscle, which will probably turn out to be a dry, tasteless, block of protein.
Just FYI, Baconnaise (from the same company) is not good. I recommend using regular bacon and regular mayonnaise instead.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Growth media is made out of a lot of different compounds, much of which is extracted from animals. For example, the media will be between 10 and 20 percent fetal calf serum. And the quantities of media needed will be huge, it will have to be changed out every week to grow and keep alive until harvesting and will probably take 2 weeks to grow to confluency.
So in effect this is going to be the world's most unvegetarian animal intensive hamburger.
Artificial meat.
Result?
No need to raise cattle.
Death of hundreds of millions of cows.
Few found in nature.
Happy, vegetarians?
A burger that special must be for something really important, like has cheeseburger for ceiling cat.
So, what if I were to tell you that I have a PhD in nutrition, or that it was the first time we'd eaten there in over a month? Would you then realize how stupid that comment was?
A McDonalds meal doesn't make you fat or give you health problems. An unhealthy diet (defined as what you consume on average) can do those things, and McDonalds can be part of an unhealthy diet. However, McDonalds can be part of a healthy diet. The key is to moderate your nutrient intake so that it is appropriate given your typical level of activity. Since you don't know my activiy level, what I ordered at McDonalds, what else I ate that day, the frequency with which I eat at fast food joints, or my age (or that for any of my family members) then how can you be so arrogant as to assume you know whether or not my decision to eat 1 meal at McDonalds was a poor one?
As a nutritionists, I wouldn't feel capable of making a determination with such a lack of context, and you my friend are no nutritionist.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
That still wouldn't justify crippling your children's life by exposing them to junk food.
where are they serving it?? on the moon??
And what, pray tell, are your qualifications?
How many years have you devoted to understanding nutrition professionally?
What peer-reviewed scientific sources do you use to inform yourself as to what is and isn't a healthy diet?
I notice a distinct lack of response to the meat of my post (no pun intended). Address those points or admit you are an ignorant troll who believes your gut to be better informed than the best science available.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Bearer of common sense and good taste.
Common sense is fraught with false positives, confirmation bias, and other logical fallacies.
Here are some examples of "common sense":
It was common sense that the world is flat for longer than it has been known to be a globe
It was common sense that bleeding and leaches were sound medical treatments at one time
it was common sense that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites only a handful of generations ago
it was common sense just a decade ago that we wouldn't see a black president in my life time.
All of these "common sense" beliefs were shown to be false based on EVIDENCE. Either provide some real evidence or just shut-up and crawl back under your bridge.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
So is the pseudo-science you wasted three years of your life writing a thesis in.
Do we really need to continue this discussion? I don't really see the point.
The downside is that without herding cows in space we won't have Firefly in real life.
You don't even know how long it takes to get a PhD in nutrition and you are trying (badly) to argue nutritional science with me? Unbelievable! For the record, a MS traditionally takes 2 years and the PhD traditionally takes an additional 4 years, for (stay with me now) 6 years.
as to your baseless assertion that my degree is pseudo science, I received my degrees from Purdue University, which is nationally recognized for its nutritional science programs. It is the antithesis of pseudo-science, unlike your appeals to "common sense"
your right, there is no point in continuing. You are convinced, in the absence of any evidence, that you know the truth and no amount of evidence to the contrary will be adequate to force even a kernel of doubt into you. I've asked for evidence repeatedly and the best you've come up with is "Because I said so".
good day
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
McDonald's new McMuscle.
So you're saying that it's ok to sue somebody for using a chemical that they would normally use on non-GM crops
Round-Up is an herbicide. Some GMOP crops are immune to it, so it would kill the non-GMO plants but not the GMO ones. If you get cross pollinated, grow out the seeds, spray them with Round-Up, then propagate those, you know exactly what you are doing.
In the countries whose academia I'm familiar with, PhD grants, in all the science disciplines, are 3 years, with the occasional extension to a 4th year for late students. AFAIK it is the same in the US. Of course I wasn't counting the Master's degree, since that's unrelated.
The fact that your education comes from a well-renowned university is irrelevant, since a lot of prestigious universities also teach psychology and other cognitive and social sciences, which are obviously not real science either.
If I may give you some advice, stop being so butthurt about people on the Internet saying things that don't really matter.
In other words, absolutely nothing whatsoever. You have surrendered the argument unconditionally.
Mod Transparent up.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Something like this was featured on "Dara O'Briain: Science Club" - I think it was episode 3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p39dw
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
In space, a screaming cow cannot be herd. Thank you. I'll be here all week. Try the (cultured) veal.
Great! Now we just have to make it healthy (or at least healthier than other food), and there'll be an actual reason to eat that hugely overpriced food!