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You've heard about solar panels, wind turbines and hybrid cars as ways to deal with global warming. What about test-tube meat?
A scientist in South Carolina says that it's possible to produce the equivalent of ground chuck in a lab -- that is, sans the cow. Dr. Vladimir Mironov at the Medical University of South Carolina has taken embryonic cells from animals and grown what he calls cultured or "in-vitro" meat. The news of this advancement broke last year, but now Mironov is trying to get funding to bring his project to the people.
The technology, he tells Reuters, not only could significantly address world hunger, it could reduce the amount of carbon and other gases that cause global warming. (A study published in 2009 claimed that more than half of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the production of meat.)
But if you didn't hear President Obama championing such Frankenstein frankfurters in his State of the Union address, don't be surprised. The government seems a little queasy about funding further research into the ultimate mystery meat.
"Bringing any new technology on the market, average, costs $1 billion," Mironov tells Reuters. "We don't even have $1 million."
Both the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture have declined to fund Mironov's research. He did find a taker in PETA, the animal-rights organization.
One of Mironov's colleagues, Nicholas Genovese, doesn't understand why people seem to turn their noses up at lab-grown meat.
"There's a yuck factor," he acknowledges. "But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are produced in a similar manner. There's yogurt, which is cultured yeast."
Great, now all we can think of is bologna-flavored Yoplait. Yuck, indeed.
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2-01-2011 @1:44PM johnkzin said... Reminds me of a "Better Off Ted" episode...
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2-03-2011 @8:34AM Francois said... In fact, we already eat artificial meat but we don't know, or we don't care. It's not the same kind of "cultured" meat but finally it's maybe worst when you see how they do industrial nuggets or things like that today.
Artifical meat could be a radically different process for food production, you just have to see that in a different way than "chemical meat made in laboratory".
In fact beer or yoghurt use the same process than cultures meat : the fermentation, ative process than developp the product.
After technical solution will be found, you'll see that the marketing will change the way you can see it. It will just be a new kind of nugget.
Some scientists in Europe and Australia are working on that since the early 2000, but the idea of "artifical meat" was made at the begining of the 20th century by french scientis Alexis Carrel in 1912, and then by Winston Churchill in 1932...
Sorry for my english, i'm french : )
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