Discover Magazine
"Top 100 Science Stories of 2005"
#50: Tissue Engineers Cook Up Plan for Lab-Grown Meat
By Sarah Webb
Most of us avoid thinking too hard about the origins of our
dinners. We happily eat chicken nuggets, willfully forgetting
that they are a meat product derived from formerly living
birds. Now science is prepared to make our cognitive dissonance
complete. Last June, in a paper published in the journal Tissue
Engineering, an international team of researchers proposed
a new kind of food handmade for sensitive carnivores (and
maybe even vegetarians): meat that comes from a laboratory
instead of a farm.
Clinical research scientists routinely grow muscle cells
in the lab. And NASA-funded experiments have succeeded in
culturing turkey muscle cells and goldfish cells as a potential
way to feed astronauts on long space missions. Jason Matheny,
a graduate student in agricultural economics and public health
at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues turned this
scheme earthward, proposing two methods for growing meat in
bulk. One would culture thin sheets of meat, seeded by cells
from a living animal, on a reusable polymer scaffold; the
other would grow meat on small edible beads that stretch with
changes in temperature.
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Currently the process is far too
expensive to bring lab-grown meat to the supermarket. A tasty
fake steak is an even more distant dream: To have the structure
of filet mignon, muscle tissue needs bloods vessels, a major
challenge to tissue engineers. Still, Matheny says that within
several years, lab meat could be used in Spam, sausage, and
even chicken nuggets. Europe has taken an interest. The Dutch
government has invested $2.4 million in a project that would
cultivate pork from stem cells.
But will people eat it? Matheny thinks so. "There's
nothing natural about a chicken that's given growth promoters
and raised in a shed with 10,000 others," he says. "As
consumers become educated, a product like this would gain
appeal."
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