Fancy a hamburger with test-tube pork?
Source: Agencies |
January 16, 2010, Saturday
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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 their bacon.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten 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 carrying out the experiments.
Other groups in the United States, Scandinavia and Japan are also researching ways to make meat in the lab, 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 the US and is not involved in the Dutch research.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells. They put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number.
So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating strips of meat about 1 centimeter long; to make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication.
There are tantalizing health possibilities in the technology.
Fish stem cells could be used to produce healthy omega 3 fatty acids, which could be mixed with the lab pork instead of the usual artery-clogging fats found in livestock meat.
"You could possibly design a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them," Matheny said.
Post said the strips they've made so far could be used as processed meat in sausages or hamburgers. Their main problem is reproducing the protein content in meat: In livestock meat, protein makes up about 99 percent of the product; the lab meat is only about 80 percent protein, giving it the softer, flimsier consistency of a scallop.
None of the researchers have actually eaten the lab-made meat yet, but Post said the lower protein content means it probably wouldn't taste anything like pork.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten 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 carrying out the experiments.
Other groups in the United States, Scandinavia and Japan are also researching ways to make meat in the lab, 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 the US and is not involved in the Dutch research.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells. They put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number.
So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating strips of meat about 1 centimeter long; to make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication.
There are tantalizing health possibilities in the technology.
Fish stem cells could be used to produce healthy omega 3 fatty acids, which could be mixed with the lab pork instead of the usual artery-clogging fats found in livestock meat.
"You could possibly design a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them," Matheny said.
Post said the strips they've made so far could be used as processed meat in sausages or hamburgers. Their main problem is reproducing the protein content in meat: In livestock meat, protein makes up about 99 percent of the product; the lab meat is only about 80 percent protein, giving it the softer, flimsier consistency of a scallop.
None of the researchers have actually eaten the lab-made meat yet, but Post said the lower protein content means it probably wouldn't taste anything like pork.
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