He is also exploring bulking up the muscle cells. “If you take your cast off after a bone break, it scares you: the muscles are gone,” he says. “But within a couple of weeks they’re back. We need to replicate that process.” The body achieves this in several ways, including exercise. In a lab setting, scientists can stimulate the tissue with electrical pulses. But that is costly and inefficient, bulking up the cells by only about 10 percent. Another method is simply to provide anchor points: once the cells are able to attach to different anchors, they develop tension on their own. Post has made anchors available by providing a scaffold of sugar polymers, which degrades over time. But at this stage, he says, “We’re not looking at Schwarzenegger muscle cells.”
He has one more method in mind, one he thinks might work best. But it is also more complex. The body naturally stimulates muscle growth with tiny micropulses of chemicals such as acetylcholine. These chemicals are cheap, which is part of what makes this approach appealing. “The trick is to do it in very, very short pulses,” Post says. The hurdles to that are technological, not scientific.
Breakthroughs in all these areas will take money, of course. In 2008 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) offered $1 million to the first person or persons who could grow commercially viable chicken in a lab by 2012. But that was mainly a publicity stunt and no help to scientists who need money to get research done now. More seriously, the Dutch government recently pledged roughly €800,000 toward a new four-year project that would continue the stem cell research at Utrecht—and also initiate a study on the social and moral questions related to in vitro meat.
The Ick Factor
Some see social acceptance as the biggest barrier of all to producing in vitro meat on a commercial scale. “I’ve mentioned cultured meat to scientists, and they all think, ‘great idea,’ ” says Oxford’s Tuomisto. “When I talk to nonscientists, they are more afraid of it. It sounds scary. Yet it’s basically the same stuff: muscle cells. It’s just produced differently.”
Cor van der Weele of Wageningen University is heading up the philosophical aspects of the new Dutch study (for example, is cultured meat a moral imperative or morally repugnant, or some combination of the two?). She has been intrigued by the emotional reactions that some people have toward the idea. “We call it the ‘yuck response,’ ” she says. “People initially think that it might be something contaminated or disgusting.”
But that perception can change quickly, van der Weele observes. She notes that people often associate cultured meat with two other ideas: genetically modified foods—which are often seen, particularly in Europe, as a dangerous corporate scheme to dominate or control the food supply—and negative perceptions of the meat industry in general, with its factory farms, disease and mistreatment of animals. Once people realize that cultured meat is not genetically modified and could be a clean, animal-friendly alternative to factory farms, she says, “the scared, very negative response is often very fleeting.”
Such observations are only anecdotal, of course. The study will assess popular responses to in vitro meat in detail—comparing reactions across different regions and cultures—and will determine ways to frame the issue that might enhance consumer interest. Proponents imagine a day when governments will levy special environmental taxes on meat produced from livestock or when consumers will be able to opt for in vitro meat that is labeled “cruelty-free.”
“I don’t think you want to know about the hygienic conditions in the majority of slaughterhouses in the U.S. or the efficiency of euthanasia,” says Post, who spent six years at Harvard University and Dartmouth College before returning home to the Netherlands in 2002. Another outbreak of disease—like mad cow or bird flu—could make cultured meat seem all the more appetizing. “We are far from what we eat,” Roelen says. “When we’re eating a hamburger, we don’t think, ‘I’m eating a dead cow.’ And when people are already so far from what they eat, it’s not too hard to see them accepting 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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