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In vitro meat, also known as laboratory-grown meat or cultured meat, is animal flesh that has never been part of a complete, living animal. Some scientists are currently experimentally growing in vitro meat in laboratories, but no meat has yet been produced for public consumption. Potentially, any animal could be a source of cells for in vitro meat.

Many biologists assert that this technology is ready for commercial use and simply needs a company to back it. Production of lab-grown meat could even be much cheaper than regular meat. For in vitro meat, costs only apply to the meat production, whereas for traditional meat, costs include animal raising and environmental protection (meaning there are fewer negative externalities associated with in vitro meat). However, there is disagreement over whether in vitro meat can be made economically competitive with traditional meat.

In vitro meat should not be confused with imitation meat, which can be a vegetarian food product produced from vegetable protein, usually from soy or gluten. The terms "synthetic meat" and "artificial meat" are synonymous, and they may refer to either.

Process and patents

Meat essentially consists of animal muscle. The process of developing in vitro meat involves taking a muscle cell from an animal through a biopsy and joining the cell with a protein that helps the cell to grow into large portions of meat. Once a cell was acquired, a new animal would not have to be used, akin to the production of yogurt cultures.

There are, loosely, two approaches for production of in vitro meat: loose muscle cells and structured muscle, the latter one being vastly more challenging than the former. Muscles consist of muscle fibers, long cells with multiple nuclei. They don't proliferate by themselves, but arise when precursor cells fuse. Precursor cells can be embryonic stem cells or satellite cells, specialized stem cells in muscle tissue. Theoretically, they can be relatively simple to culture in a bioreactor and then later made to fuse. For the growth of real muscle however, the cells should grow "on the spot", which requires a perfusion system akin to a blood supply to deliver nutrients and oxygen close to the growing cells, as well as remove the waste products. In addition, other cell types, such as adipocytes, need to be grown, and chemical messengers should provide clues to the growing tissue about the structure. Lastly, muscle tissue needs to be physically stretched or "exercised" to properly develop.

In 2001, dermatologist Wiete Westerhof from the University of Amsterdam and medical doctor Willem van Eelen and businessman Willem van Kooten announced that they had filed for a worldwide patent on a process to produce in vitro meat. A matrix of collagen is seeded with muscle cells, which are then bathed in a nutritious solution and induced to divide. Jon F. Vein of the United States secured a patent (U.S. patent 6,835,390 B1) for the production of tissue-engineered meat for human consumption, wherein muscle and fat cells would be grown in an integrated fashion to create food products such as beef, poultry and fish. Van Eelen said that he had thought of the idea of in vitro meat for years, since he was held in a Japanese POW camp.

History

Winston Churchill said in the 1930s, "Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

The development of in vitro meat originally arose out of experiments conducted by NASA, attempting to find improved forms of long-term food for astronauts in space. The technique was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1995, and NASA has been conducting experiments since 2001, producing in vitro meat from turkey cells. In 2000, the Applied BioScience Research Consortium produced the first edible form, from cells of a goldfish that were grown to resemble fish fillets.

The first peer-reviewed journal article published on the subject of laboratory-grown meat appeared in a 2005 issue of Tissue Engineering.

In 2008, PETA offered a $1 million prize to the first company that brings lab-grown chicken meat to consumers by 2012. The Dutch government has put $4 million into experiments into in vitro meat. The In Vitro Meat Consortium, a group formed by international researchers interested in the technology, held the first international conference on the production of in vitro meat, hosted by the Food Research Institute of Norway in April 2008, to discuss commercial possibilities.

Benefits

Health

In vitro meat is cleaner and less prone to disease and bacteria contamination than meat garnered from livestock, provided that donor cells are not contaminated. With relatively simple isolation procedures, economically damaging culls could be avoided along with consumer illness and industry expense from meat recalls. The in vitro meat is also free from the growth hormones and antibiotics that are fed to many animals in intensive factory farming.

In part because the fat content of meats could be brought more fully under our control, and also because other chemical constituents could be altered to produce the best nutrient balance, meat could be made a healthier product than at present. Specifically, researchers cite the addition of omega-3 as a positive factor. New Harvest founder and in vitro meat researcher Jason Matheny says that the fat content of a hamburger produced in vitro could be similar to that of salmon.

There is also the benefit that there are no bones involved in this form of production, which are often removed from real meat for convenience. This also reduces the risk of choking and reduces waste.

Ethical considerations

Animal rights groups support in vitro meat because its production does not inflict pain and suffering on animals. In vitro meat is grown without any nervous system, thereby avoiding ethical questions regarding pain.

Environment

According to Dutch sausage manufacturer Stegeman, the negative environmental consequences of current forms of meat production, including forms of pollution such as nitrate contamination and methane gases that are a byproduct of current methods of industrial meat production, are reduced. While there will be some byproducts in the process of creating the nutrients to grow the cells, the environmental damage should still be lessened. Less of the animal would be wasted, in addition to the waste byproducts produced by livestock; in the United States, livestock create 1.4 billion tons of waste per year.

Space food

On long space voyages or stays, in vitro meat could be grown alongside hydroponic vegetables.

Increase in consumer choice and reductions in cost of production

Many kinds of animals are far too expensive to produce by the conventional agribusiness industries, even through factory farming (lions, for example). In part, this is due to some of these animals being "secondary consumers" — this denotes an animal that generally relies on other animals for sustenance. The energy in the flesh of their prey comes from the vegetation it ate while living, which in turn came from sunlight. Each transfer of energy from one living being to another is inefficient; only a small fraction of the available energy is carried over. To farm these kinds of animals would mean farming enough vegetation to feed the primary consuming animals to feed the secondary consuming animals to feed us, which is expensive. Yet with in vitro grown flesh, it is possible to greatly increase the variety of flesh available on the market, since the energy is supplied directly via a "perfusion system", as described above. The meat of extinct animals could also be produced.

For this and other reasons, it is predicted that in vitro flesh would cost much less to produce than factory or free-range farmed animal flesh, and the production industries would not need to be given the massive subsidies that are given to many agribusiness industries in the west today.

Arguments against

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Artificiality

Consumers whose stated preference is whole and unprocessed food may find such a high-technology approach to food production distasteful, for reasons aesthetic, cultural, or ethical.

Quality, safety, health

People may be concerned that in vitro meat is of lesser quality than traditional meat, and that there are unresolved health risks. This question is one of the main focuses of scientists working on in vitro meat, and they aim to produce healthier meat than conventional meat, most notably by reducing its fat content and controlling nutrients. For example, most meats are high in saturated fat, which can cause high cholesterol and other health problems. While a common misconception about in vitro meat relates it to genetic engineering, scientists have pointed out that the cells involved are natural cells which would grow in a natural way.

Differences from traditionally produced meat

If in vitro meat is different in appearance, taste, smell, texture, and other factors, it may not be appealing to some. The lack of fat and bone may also be a disadvantage, for these parts make appreciable culinary contributions according to some. Many food items, such as surimi, designed to substitute for other ingredients (for reasons from morality to expense) have become independently sought out for their own properties.

Sexuality

If you like to surprise your wife when she's chopping meat then we have a major problem.

Research

Challenges

At the moment, comparatively little research has been made on the subject of in vitro meat, although the science for it exists already and is simultaneously being developed for purposes of helping those with muscular dystrophy and growing transplant organs. There are several obstacles to overcome if it has any chance of succeeding; at the moment, the most notable ones are scale and cost.

• Proliferation of muscle cells: Although it is not very difficult to make stem cells divide, for meat production it is necessary that they divide at a quick pace, producing the solid meat. This requirement has some overlap with the medical branch of tissue engineering.
• Culture medium: Proliferating cells need a food source to grow and develop. The growth medium should be a well-balanced mixture of ingredients and growth factors. Depending on the motives of the researchers, the growth medium has additional requirements.
  • Commercial: The growth medium should be inexpensive to produce. A plant-based medium has been found to be less inexpensive than fetal bovine serum.
  • Environmental: The production of the growth medium shouldn't have a negative effect on the environment. This means that the production should be energetically favorable. Additionally, the ingredients should come from completely renewable sources. Minerals from mined sources are in this case not possible, as are synthetically produced nutrients which use non-renewable sources.
  • Animal welfare: The growth medium should be devoid of animal sources.
• Bioreactors: Nutrients and oxygen need to be delivered close to each growing cell, on the scale of millimeters. In animals this job is handled by blood vessels. A bioreactor should emulate this function in an efficient manner. The usual approach is the creation of a sponge-like matrix in which the cells can grow, and perfusing it with the growth medium.

Initiatives

Probably the first research into in vitro meat was performed by M. A. Benjaminson from Touro College. His research group managed to grow muscle tissue from goldfish in a laboratory setting with several kinds of growth media.

In 2004, a group of researchers started the non-profit organization New Harvest, with the goal of promoting research into in vitro meat. Among the founders are Jason Matheny and Vladimir Mironov. According to their website, cultured meat in a processed form, like sausage, hamburger, or chicken nuggets, may become commercially available within several years.

In April 2005, a research project into cultured meat started in The Netherlands, and in 2008, it was reported that most research into in vitro meat is being conducted by Dutch scientific teams. The research is carried out under the lead of Henk Haagsman, a meat science researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the Eindhoven University of Technology and Utrecht University, in cooperation with sausage manufacturer Stegeman. The Dutch government granted a two million euro subsidy for the project. Scientists in Amsterdam study the culture medium, while the University of Utrecht studies the proliferation of muscle cells, and the Eindhoven university will research bioreactors.

On April 21, 2008, PETA announced a $1 million X-Prize style reward for the first group to successfully produce synthetic meat that is comparable to and commercially viable against naturally sourced meat products. PETA said that the number was derived from the same number of chickens killed for food per hour in the United States, one million.

In fiction

• In the book Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson, artificial meat, called vatgrown flesh, is mentioned as food sold in stores, cheaper than meat from living animals.
• In The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, artificial meat is grown in huge lumps tens of metres in diameter, workmen walking on top of it harvest slices with big knives.
• In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) by Samuel R. Delany, the main character's culture uses vat-grown meat cultured from humans as the primary protein source. Interaction between this culture and cultures using 'natural' meat are (briefly) explored.
• Claude Zidi's 1976 comedy film L'aile ou la cuisse starring Louis de Funès as top-notch gourmet and Julien Guiomar as the infamous Tricatel who secretly produces artificial food.
• In Assimilating our Culture, That's What they're Doing!, one of Larry Niven's short stories set in the Draco Tavern, a man who visits the tavern is depressed by the fact that he has licensed his own genome to an alien race, who are mass-producing headless clones of him for the meat market on their home planet.
• The Bob the Angry Flower strips, The Vegetarian's Dilemma and Meat Sheets.
• In the short story collection "The State of the Art" by Iain M. Banks, one of the stories includes a party where the main course is vat grown meat from cells of notable human villains and megalomaniacs, with "stewed Idi Amin" and "Richard Nixon Burgers" among others.
• In Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, 'Chicky Knobs' were chickens with only a mouth and a digestive tract that were genetically engineered for meat products.
• Although not called "in vitro meat", the creation of zombification in the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising was the result of US scientists trying to mass produce meat for consumption. The engineered wasps that were to facilitate this escaped from the Santa Cabeza complex and 'zombified' the populace, resulting in military intervention. Two of the survivors of that incident, Carlito and Isabella Keyes, started a new outbreak in the Southwest town of Willamette in revenge, where the game takes place.
• A popular urban legend describes a genetically engineered vat-grown creature, dubbed "Animal 57", as the source of meat for various fast-food chains.
• In Rudy Rucker Ware Tetralogy almost all of the meat was tank grown, including human meat.

See also

• Cell culture
• BioArt
• Genetic modification
• Hydroponics
• In vitro toxicology
• Tissue culture

References

1. ^ "In Search of a Test-Tube Hamburger". TIME. 2008-04-23. Retrieved 2009-04-30. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
2. ^ http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90235492
3. ^ "The Future of Food: The No-kill Carnivore". Portfolio. 2009-02-23. Retrieved 2009-08-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
4. ^ "In Vitro Meat". The New York Times. 2005-12-11. Retrieved 2009-08-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
5. (patent number WO9931222)
6. ^ "Patent holder Willem van Eelen: 'In another five years meat will come out of the factory'". Financiel Dagblad. 2007-12-12.
7. ^ "Test-tube meat science's next leap". The Australian. 2007-01-20. Retrieved 2009-04-30. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
8. ^ "Paper Says Edible Meat Can be Grown in a Lab on Industrial Scale". University of Maryland. 2005-07-06. Retrieved 2008-10-12. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
9. "Catachem, Inc Announces FDA Approval of UIBC In-Vitro Diagnostic (IVD) Chemistry Reagent Kit". BioPortfolio. 1995-02-21. Retrieved 2008-12-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
10. "The Year in Science: Technology". Discovery. 2006-01-06. Retrieved 2009-08-07. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
11. ^ Cite error: The named reference discovery 2008 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
12. Kruglinski, Susan (2008-09-22). "I'll Have My Burger Petri-Dish Bred, With Extra Omega-3". Discovery. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |coauthor= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
13. Bittman, Mark (2008-01-27). "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler". The New York Times.
14. Koerner, Brendan I. (2008-05-20). "Will Lab-Grown Meat Save the Planet? Or is it only good for cows and pigs?". Slate.
15. Schonwald, Josh (2009-05). "Future fillet". University of Chicago Magazine. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
16. Pigott, George M. (1990). Seafood. CRC Press. p. 236. ISBN 0824779223. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
17. "Lab Meat: Tastes Like a Million Bucks". PETA. 2008-04-21.

External links

• In Vitro Meat Consortium, scientists interested in research into in vitro meat
• "Advancing Meat Substitutes", New Harvest, nonprofit organization to fund research into in vitro meat
• PETA $1 million contest rules

Patents

• Patent WO9931222 Industrial Scale Production of Meat from in vitro Cell Cultures
• Patent 20060029922 Industrial production of meat - A meat product containing in vitro produced animal cells in a three dimensional form and a method for producing the meat product

News coverage

• "Lab-grown meat could ease food shortage", New Scientist
• "Fish fillets grow in tank", New Scientist
• "Lab-grown steaks nearing the menu", New Scientist
• "Lab-grown steak", Slashdot discussion
• "Semi-Living Food: Disembodied Cuisine", The Tissue Culture & Art Project
• In vitro meat on "FutureFood - Meat without livestock"
• "Lending Muscle to Artificial Meat Production", Reactive Reports
• Would You Eat Lab-Grown Meat?, Traci Hukill, AlterNet (12 July 2006)
• Scientist seeks burger investors
• PETA announces In Vitro X-Prize

Journal articles

• M.A. Benjaminson et al. (2002). In vitro edible muscle protein production system (mpps): stage 1, fish. Acta Astronautica 51 (12): 879-889.
• P.D. Edelman et al. (2005). Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production. Tissue Engineering 11 (5-6): 659-662.
• Loose technical notes on in vitro meat

• Animal rights
• Meat
• Meat substitutes
• Vegetarianism