Here's something you might be interested in.
Michael Specter in the New Yorker (May 23) reports that scientists in the Netherlands have succeeded in creating test-tube (in vitro) beef hamburger meat, grown from cell culture of cow cells. .
The doctor who started this research and continues to lobby for it is a Dutch WWII prisoner of war named Willem van Eelen, now 87, who nearly died from starvation in a brutal Japanese POW camp in Indonesia. Returning home sensitized to suffering, he wondered, Why can't we grow meat outside of the body? "I like meat — I never became a vegetarian. But it is hard to justify the way animals are treated on this planet. Growing meat without inflicting pain seemed a natural solution."
NASA funded a 2001 experiment focused on producing fresh meat for space flights, starting with a cut-up goldfish that, cultured, produced more goldfish "meat," and PETA has offered a bounty to the first scientist to produce credible lab-grown chicken. Meanwhile, Dutch scientists kept plugging away, using techniques from stem-cell biology and tissue engineering, until they got it — in-vitro hamburger meat!
They're still a very long way from being able to produce a steak — but face it, hamburger meat (at least in the U.S.) is by far the most popular meat purchase for both home and restaurant use. And the lab-grown stuff can easily be doctored. It needs fats for umami, but these don't have to be cholesterol-raising fats, they can be "good fats" (i.e., omega-3 fatty acids like those in salmon) so that your lab-burger would actually be good for you.
The big problem now is cost and volume — the Dutch labs can still only produce a little at a time, at a high price, whereas the popularity of hamburger meat is based in large part on its cheapness — a concomittant of the brutality generally involved in raising and slaughtering it for fast-food chains and supermarket meat cases. So don't look for Soylent Cow in your supermarket meat case anytime soon, alas.
See next post for reactions to this development.
Michael Specter in the New Yorker (May 23) reports that scientists in the Netherlands have succeeded in creating test-tube (in vitro) beef hamburger meat, grown from cell culture of cow cells. .
The doctor who started this research and continues to lobby for it is a Dutch WWII prisoner of war named Willem van Eelen, now 87, who nearly died from starvation in a brutal Japanese POW camp in Indonesia. Returning home sensitized to suffering, he wondered, Why can't we grow meat outside of the body? "I like meat — I never became a vegetarian. But it is hard to justify the way animals are treated on this planet. Growing meat without inflicting pain seemed a natural solution."
NASA funded a 2001 experiment focused on producing fresh meat for space flights, starting with a cut-up goldfish that, cultured, produced more goldfish "meat," and PETA has offered a bounty to the first scientist to produce credible lab-grown chicken. Meanwhile, Dutch scientists kept plugging away, using techniques from stem-cell biology and tissue engineering, until they got it — in-vitro hamburger meat!
They're still a very long way from being able to produce a steak — but face it, hamburger meat (at least in the U.S.) is by far the most popular meat purchase for both home and restaurant use. And the lab-grown stuff can easily be doctored. It needs fats for umami, but these don't have to be cholesterol-raising fats, they can be "good fats" (i.e., omega-3 fatty acids like those in salmon) so that your lab-burger would actually be good for you.
The big problem now is cost and volume — the Dutch labs can still only produce a little at a time, at a high price, whereas the popularity of hamburger meat is based in large part on its cheapness — a concomittant of the brutality generally involved in raising and slaughtering it for fast-food chains and supermarket meat cases. So don't look for Soylent Cow in your supermarket meat case anytime soon, alas.
See next post for reactions to this development.