By that time, an American scientist had already succeeded in growing a piece of fish filet in a lab. Using a small grant from NASA, which was interested in developing food sources for deep-space voyages, Morris Benjaminson removed skeletal muscle from a common goldfish and grew it outside the fish’s body. Then an associate briefly marinated the explants in olive oil, chopped garlic, lemon and pepper, covered them in bread crumbs and deep-fried them. “A panel of female colleagues gave it a visual and sniff test,” says Benjaminson, now an emeritus professor at Touro College in Bay Shore, N.Y. “It looked and smelled pretty much the same as any fish you could buy at the supermarket.” But NASA, apparently convinced there were easier ways to provide protein to astronauts on long deep-space voyages, declined to further fund Benjaminson’s research.
The Dutch money was used by van Eelen and H. P. Haagsman, a scientist at Utrecht University, to fund a consortium that would aim to show that stem cells could be taken from farm animals, cultured and induced to become skeletal muscle cells. The team included a representative from meat company Meester Stegeman BV, then part of Sara Lee Corporation in Europe, and top scientists at three Dutch universities. Each university studied different aspects of in vitro meat production. Scientists at the University of Amsterdam focused on producing efficient growth media; a group at Utrecht worked on isolating stem cells, making them proliferate and coaxing them into muscle cells; and those at Eindhoven University of Technology attempted to “train” the muscle cells to grow larger.
The scientists made some progress. They were able to grow small, thin strips of muscle tissue in the lab—stuff that looked like bits of scallop and had the chewy texture of calamari—but several obstacles remained to commercial-scale production. “We gained knowledge; we knew a lot more, but we still didn’t have [something that tasted like] a T-bone steak that came from a petri dish,” says Peter Verstrate, who represented Meester Stegeman in the consortium and now works as a consultant. In time, the Dutch money ran out.
Van Eelen now fumes that one scientist involved was “stupid” and others just milked him and the Dutch government for money. “I don’t know what they did in four years—talking, talking, talking—every year taking more of the money,” he says. For their part, the scientists say that van Eelen never understood the scale of the challenge. “He had a naive idea that you could put muscle cells in a petri dish and they would just grow, and if you put money into a project, you’d have meat in a couple of years,” says Bernard Roelen, a cell biologist who worked on the project at Utrecht.
Van Eelen was not the only one who imagined a revolution. In 2005 an article in the New York Times concluded that “in a few years’ time there may be a lab-grown meat ready to market as sausages or patties.” A couple of months before the story appeared, researchers had published the first peer-reviewed article on cultured meat in the journal Tissue Engineering.* The authors included Jason G. Matheny, co-founder of the lab-produced meat advocacy group New Harvest. He understands the challenges better than most. “Tissue engineering is really hard and extremely expensive right now,” he says. “To enjoy market adoption, we mainly need to solve the technical problems that increase the cost of engineered meat.” That will take money, he notes, and few governments or organizations have been willing to commit necessary funding.
*Clarification (5/19/11): The sentence refers to the paper as the first peer-reviewed article on cultured meat; the paper is the first peer-reviewed article on the prospects for industrial production of cultured meat.
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14 Comments
Add CommentSlaughtering other creatures so we can eat them is horribly barbaric. I look forward to doing away with that practice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock business accounts for about 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions" This 18% figure has been widely debunked. It was based on false assumptions about land use. The real percentage is about half that. While 9% is still significant, even that can be mostly eliminated if the animals were raised in an appropriate (but more expensive) way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do hope growing meat in a dish does eventually work. Unfortunately, such meat would probably need antibiotics, which is the only reason why I wouldn't eat it. For health reasons I don't eat much meat anyway, so it isn't much of an issue.
While making choices that reduce greenhouse gases is a good thing and everyone should do it, realistically there's no way it'll be enough to stop global warming. It may be enough to slow it down a bit, which has some value, but not stop it. Humanity will survive, as we always adapt to new changes, but many other species will go extinct, and it will cost us a lot of money.
It seems to me that the idealism of being able to duplicate nature's steaks is misguided and counter productive.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe don't need to limited ourselves to creating product identical to nature's own. We need to start with creating as close a product as possible and using other methods of processing to then shape it into something like 'meat.
Then we can move forward in steps to the possibility of getting closer to the 'real' thing, IF the intermediary product is not good enough.
Who knows ? People might well be more than satisfied with an intermediary product.
By limiting this research work to only duplicating nature, we are holding back the core goal of this whole research process - to produce a product that enables us to reduce the numbers of animals we slaughter for meat.
I invite people to look for and read a scifi story involving "chicken little."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading about food in Sci Am lately one might think there is an implicit assumption that meat and other animal protein is essential for human health. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most Americans get far too much protein as it is and would be much healthier eating only plant-based foods. There is a protein myth propagated by the meat dairy industry and it's virtual proxy, the USDA. Their propaganda is based on no research, in fact, ignores research to the contrary. Fact: there is no need for animal protein. We would be far healthier without it. For a great review of this topic read T. Colin Campbell's "The China Study". It changed my life. What I learned in grade school and medical school about nutrition was paid for by industry and just plain wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReplacing real meat with cultured meat, while maybe reducing animal cruelty, would likely consume huge amounts of energy to grow and contribute at least as much to global warming. There is far too much industrial food as it is now. Let's just eat plants and live low on the food chain. We would all live longer and the planet would be better off.
George T, MD
Plant based diets are the most effective, but lab grown meat could be of use in deterring murder (murder should be illegal outright)... similarly, sex robots could be made to stop rapists (no joke there).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou wrote:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Replacing real meat with cultured meat, while maybe reducing animal cruelty, would likely consume huge amounts of energy to grow and contribute at least as much to global warming."
Well I don't know how ultimately accurate this article is ... but they claim the following in the article above:
"if scientists grew the muscle cells in a culture of cyanobacteria hydrolysate (a bacterium cultivated in ponds), would involve “approximately 35 to 60 percent lower energy use, 80 to 95 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions and 98 percent lower land use compared to conventionally produced meat products in Europe.”"
That seems to be the answer to your concern.
As the article mentioned, the concept of slaughter-free meat was originally brought into the public eye by PETA’s $1 million prize offering to the first R&D team to produce commercial quantities of meat grown in vitro. It is also important to note that, in the absence of Federal funding for cultured meat development in the United States, PETA is directly supporting the only currently active academic research toward this emerging technology. In both concept and implementation, PETA has taken on a pioneering role in cultured meat development.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that the idea of growing protein in bioreactors is a good one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever the idea that "much of the 30% of ice free land can be converted to other uses" needs looking at. Quite a lot of it is desert. Quite a lot is semi-arid, and only suitable for extensive livestock grazing.
On the other hand a lot of the meat that is consumed in advanced countries such as the USA is raised in feed lots, sometimes in appalling conditions, on grains which are suitable for human consumption.
I myself really like the idea of creating muscle in a vat...who knows whats next...a heart..a kidney(etc.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor the vegetarians posting...not interested..don't get me wrong, I love my veggies and my fruit, but I also love a great steak or even a great hamburger...
ps..the hearts and kidneys would be for transplants not eating...yech;-)
And what if the only line that can efficiently produce edible, nutritious, and tasty flesh is human? No animals (humans included) would have to be slaughtered. Except for the “yuck” factor, this would be humane. A question for the ethicists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is really only one word for "Inside the Meat Lab" written by journalist Bartholet (as unfortunately are so many of your articles these days); silly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile the author correctly points out how wasteful traditional production of beef is, the discussion of growing meat in a lab is very poorly reported. There is no discussion of the possible conversion rate (the ratio of feed input to meat output – typically over 6 for beef today) of the mythical process, nor where the "culture of cyanobacteria" comes from or how much it would cost or what the inputs for it would be.
As every vegan knows (and I know some quite chubby ones) there are many very acceptable meat substitutes commercially available today that do a creditable job of mimicking meat with a conversion rate of 1. Farmed fish produce marketable fish with conversion rates below 1.5 and a GMO salmon awaiting FDA approval can bring that ratio to close to 1.25. Why waste scarce research dollars on pie in the sky ideas such as lab grown meat? To what advantage even if it could be made to work?
The one bit of good news in the article is that NASA, which often pursues some pretty nutty ideas, at least was smart enough to stop throwing money on this one!
This is bizarre. Just as factory farming of all kinds lowers the costs and the nutritional density of our foods this is just another step backwards. We've already lowered the variety of the foods we eat to an all time low. Having beef from one genetic line (the one that produces the best) is not going to improve nutrition, I'm thinking.
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