Vat Grown Meat, It's What's For Dinner

Laboratory moo. [Link]

In this week's New Yorker, Michael Specter takes a great look at the world of in-vitro meat—grown in a lab, outside an animal body. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will you eat it?

One of the pioneering figures in this field, Willem van Eelen, dreamed up many of the techniques used today, which rely on cell cultures to foster growth. Many are excited about the prospect of lab-grown meat for various reasons: It could be more efficient than raising and slaughtering animals. It could be healthier than the sickly animals used whose bodies are chock full of pathogens and anti-biotics. It could finally make PETA STFU.

But how is it done? Here's how one lab in Eindhoven accomplishes the task:

The initial cells are typically taken from a mouse. (The Dutch have also focused on pork stem cells, because pigs are readily available to them, often reclaimed from eggs discarded at slaughterhouses or taken from biopsies.) Researchers then submerge those cells in amino acids, sugars, and minerals. Generally, that mixture consists of fetal serum taken from calves...After the cells age, van der Schaft and her colleagues place them on biodegradable scaffolds, which help them grow together into muscle tissue. That tissue can then be fused and formed into meat that can be processed as if it were ground beef or pork.