Buster
Lovin' The Homestead
When you can grow your meat in a lab?
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Scientists aim to create pork in a petri dish
January 19, 2010
Call it pork in a petri dish - a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger and save some pigs.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006 and, while they admit they haven't got the texture quite right (the lab-grown meat has the consistency and feel of scallop), they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.
"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need 1 million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.
Several other groups in the US, Scandinavia and Japan are also researching ways to make meat in the laboratory, but the Dutch project is the most advanced, said Jason Matheny, who has studied alternatives to conventional meat at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and is not involved in the Dutch research.
In the US, similar research was funded by NASA, which hoped astronauts would be able to grow their own meat in space.
But after growing disappointingly thin sheets of tissue, NASA gave up and decided it would be better for its astronauts simply to eat vegetarian.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells.
They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number.
So far the scientists have succeeded only in creating strips of meat about one centimetre long. To make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication in the lab...
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Read the rest of the story here:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/env...reate-pork-in-a-petri-dish-20100119-mi9a.html
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Scientists aim to create pork in a petri dish
January 19, 2010
Call it pork in a petri dish - a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger and save some pigs.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006 and, while they admit they haven't got the texture quite right (the lab-grown meat has the consistency and feel of scallop), they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.
"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need 1 million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.
Several other groups in the US, Scandinavia and Japan are also researching ways to make meat in the laboratory, but the Dutch project is the most advanced, said Jason Matheny, who has studied alternatives to conventional meat at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and is not involved in the Dutch research.
In the US, similar research was funded by NASA, which hoped astronauts would be able to grow their own meat in space.
But after growing disappointingly thin sheets of tissue, NASA gave up and decided it would be better for its astronauts simply to eat vegetarian.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells.
They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number.
So far the scientists have succeeded only in creating strips of meat about one centimetre long. To make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication in the lab...
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Read the rest of the story here:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/env...reate-pork-in-a-petri-dish-20100119-mi9a.html
