Scientists Work To Grow Meat In a Lab 376
codeman07 writes "In a small laboratory on an upper floor of the basic science building at the Medical University of South Carolina, Vladimir Mironov, M.D., Ph.D., has been working for a decade to grow meat. A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, 56, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering 'cultured' meat. It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way... on the hoof. Growth of 'in-vitro' or cultured meat is also underway in the Netherlands, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand."
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
Nice to see that Mironov is still getting some attention, but this story is at least five years old. I wrote a feature story about lab-grown meat almost six years ago for the Village Voice, which goes into much more detail than the Reuters piece: http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-07-26/art/brave-new-hamburger/
Re:"Bio-engineered 'cultured' meat" (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with killing an animal for meat is that a hell of a lot of resources go into growing bits you can't eat just to get a single harvest, although those bits are not without their uses; and requires a lot of land to raise them, even more so if you are looking for ethical farming methods because you have to consider psychological wellbeing rather than just physical wellbeing.
Growing meat in a factory rather than in a field means you can provide just the nutrients needed to grow the bits you actually want to eat, don't require much space and even that space which is needed (however big the VATs and supporting machinery is) can be used more efficently because you can stack the machines into a multistorey building making for a tiny footprint of land use.
Re:Ethically Delicious (Score:2, Informative)
Uh, sorry to burst your bubble of cows dancing free in the surf but I doubt people are going to keep cows for pets after we eliminate their need as a food source.
All that will be left of cows is dairy herds...until we learn how to replace that too, and then I doubt there will be many cows at all except in zoos. Modern breeds will hardly thrive in the 'wild'.
Also, what ethical problem is there is eating meat ?!?
Re:Ethical Dilemma,A scifi story (Score:4, Informative)
Arthur C Clarke, The Food of the Gods
Re:Old news (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot will automatically turn a URL into a link. The problem is that GGP posted as AC, and AC can't post links.
Weighing the options, I'd rather it remain that way.
Re:Treat the disease not the symptom... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm going to slice it differently. And I'm even a mostly-vegetarian.
The reason that humans have been domesticating animals for food for millenia has a lot to do with animals being able to take advantage of food sources that humans couldn't or wouldn't eat. For instance, pigs were raised in large part on table scraps. Cattle, sheep, and goats were raised on grasses, typically in places where growing plants wasn't viable. Chickens and ducks were expected to forage quite a bit. All this made perfect sense, and can increase overall food supply.
What doesn't make sense (in terms of increasing the food supply) is using perfectly good arable land to grow feed corn that humans really don't want to eat, then turn around and feed that corn to animals who aren't built to eat corn, and then pump those animals full of drugs to ensure that they don't get sick eating the corn that they aren't really supposed to be eating. From a purely engineering standpoint, feedlot beef is probably the least efficient food on the planet, and the only reason that it's economically viable at all is because of artificially low prices for feed corn created by a combination of US government policy and massive overproduction.