Many people around the world are eating meat and enjoying it. But meat has a number of adverse effects on human health because of the use of drugs used to raise livestock or on the environment because of pollution from farm animal wastes. Now, scientists from the University of Maryland are proposing new techniques to grow edible meat in their labs on an industrial scale. "The idea of culturing meat is to create an edible product that tastes like cuts of beef, poultry, pork, lamb or fish and has the nutrients and texture of meat." The researchers say that demand for meat is doubling every ten years in countries like India or China and say that with their techniques, "a single cell could theoretically produce the world's annual meat supply." Ready to learn more?
As an appetizer, here is the introduction of the University of Maryland news release.
Experiments for NASA space missions have shown that small amounts of edible meat can be created in a lab. But the technology that could grow chicken nuggets without the chicken, on a large scale, may not be just a science fiction fantasy.
Now, let's go for the entree. Below is an illustration of the process leading to a perfectly healthy hamburger. (Credit: University of Maryland)
Here are the steps: 1. Scaffold-based cultured meat production: 1. Myoblasts in petri dish; 2. Porous collagen microspheres; 3. Myoblasts form myotubes on collagen microspheres; 4. Bioreactor; 5. Microwave; 6. Hamburger.
One of the techniques used to produce edible animal meat made of skeletal muscle tissue is scaffold-based and appropriate for producing processed meats, such as hamburger or sausage.
In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier, such as a collagen meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat [as seen on the above image.]
After these technical explanations, let's return to the University of Maryland news release.
The salt person and blasted place
I furnish with the meat of a fable;
If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble
An upright man in the antipodes
Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:
Over the past table I repeat this present grace.
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
Scientists know that a single muscle cell from a cow or chicken can be isolated and divided into thousands of new muscle cells. Experiments with fish tissue have created small amounts of in vitro meat in NASA experiments researching potential food products for long-term space travel, where storage is a problem.
"But that was a single experiment and was geared toward a special situation - space travel," says Matheny. "We need a different approach for large scale production."
Matheny's team developed ideas for two techniques that have potential for large scale meat production. One is to grow the cells in large flat sheets on thin membranes. The sheets of meat would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked on top of one another to increase thickness.
The other method would be to grow the muscle cells on small three-dimensional beads that stretch with small changes in temperature. The mature cells could then be harvested and turned into a processed meat, like nuggets or hamburgers.
The first research paper about future industrial production of cultured meat was published as a commentary by Tissue Engineering in its June 29, 2005 issue under the name "Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production." Here is a link to this paper (PDF format, 4 pages, 50 KB).
But this commentary was based on a longer paper, also named "In vitro cultured meat production," and written in 2004. Here is a link to this full paper (PDF format, 27 pages, 290 KB). The illustration above and its legend come from this paper.
Now, Matheny has now decided to join New Harvest, "a nonprofit research organization working to develop new meat substitutes, including cultured meat -- meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal."
So when will we eat 'cultured' meat? I guess that many organizations around the world will carefully look at this kind of solution before approving or refusing it.
... exchanging platitudes, as Frenchmen do, for the pleasure of feeling their mouths full of the good meat of common sense.
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
I' m not sure to feel comfortable with this idea of 'cultured' meat. Please tell me if you're ready for a synthetic steak.
Sources: University of Maryland news release, July 6, 2005; and various web sites
Related stories can be found in the following categories.
Agriculture
Biotechnology
Environment
Food
Future.