When I was at school in the UK (alas, many many years ago), I used to love writing short stories. Unfortunately, I no longer have the luxury of time to pursue this hobby.
Strange as it might sound, I won a school writing award for a story I submitted about harnessing biotechnology for food and the creation of transgenic animals for human health.
Admittedly at the time, I had read only very little about xenotransplantation or about food production, but my active teenage imagination took care of a lot of the details in the script. Without going into too many details about my short story, it somewhat resembles this article that I found on line, except that it includes my current favorite topic: stem cells.
I really thought the article was marvellous and have posted it here in its entirety. However, you could click on link just to check out the illustration that comes along with it.
Who needs animals? It's only a matter of time before lab-grown meat turns into the oink-less BLT
BY Ian Christe
It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.
Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)
Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process," says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat." One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.
Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture or dispersed through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a decade. Bon appétit.
If I can find that story I childishly wrote so long ago, maybe I'll post it and we can do a two decade double-take... strangely it doesn't take a whole generation for technology to catch up and make what you read in a book or saw on TV a reality.
Stem Cell technological application may be a lot wider than we currently know.
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2 comments:
Wow! This means the vegetarians would no longer anything to complain about, because no live animals were "killed." I'd buy it if it tasted good and wasn't too bizarre looking. Red meat is essential. It takes 22 cups of white flour to equal just some of the nutrition in an ounce of red meat. Plants cannot replace the vitamins, minerals and protein found in red meat.
Hi there!
Thanks for your comment. Indeed this would present an alternative for people who are vegetarian out of concern over the welfare of farmed animals.
However, growing stem cells for a meat substitute might still be a while away.I remember that in the 1980's (or was it the 1990's?) that a product which was touted as vegetarian's answer to protein called Quorn was marketed like crazy and every female on a diet plan was consuming it on a fairly regular basis. It was available in large chain supermarkets like Waitrose and Sainsbury's then, but now I haven't seen the brand anymore.
It's never easy to get people to switch familiar food groups, and it will depend on a few factors, cost and taste being one of them.
Since the scientists have to "stretch" the meat, I wonder if they'll be able to produce all the different cuts suitable for a range of dishes.
Well, we'll see if this application of stem cells will be a commercial hit.
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