Meet Test Tube Meat

The first beef created in a science lab in the Netherlands is being grown and by October physiologist Mark Post thinks it will reach the size of a golfball and be big enough to cook to see if the meat grown from cow muscle stem cells is any good. If successful this will be the most expensive hamburger ever made.

The $330,000 project underway at Maastricht University is privately funded by an anonymous backer and Post tells media at a press conference at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Vancouver that it will take 20-30 years using this technique before stem cell meat production is efficient enough to make sense.

Cow Stem Cells Grow Strips of Beef Muscle in a Lab, Photo by Mark Post

Post has already built several small strips of cow muscle tissue that form the foundation for his first burger patty. Now he just needs to make thousands more and he thinks he’ll get there by October.

But according to University of Missouri geneticist Nicholas Genovese (PDF), global meat consumption will rise about 60 percent by 2050, making alternative meat production not just a novelty but a necessity. He and other scientists want to find ways to make meats that are more environmentally friendly, healthy, and in some cases less cruel to animals.

Stanford University Medical School biochemist Patrick Brown says, “Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing environmental catastrophe.” He says grazing cattle or raising pigs requires intensive energy and land use, calling farming an incredibly inefficient system long overdue for a technological revolution.

Genovese says concentrated animal feeding operations common in large-scale meat production carry higher risk deadly outbreaks of E. coli infection which could be controlled with synthetic meats.

Brown and Post hope to compete head-to-head with the $74 billion dollar U.S. beef industry, which is also looking at alternative meat solutions.

While Post grows his beef from stem cells in a lab, Brown uses plant materials. Post says growing meat this way will use about 40 percent less energy than traditional livestock production.

But will people eat test tube meat? Word on the street now is probably not. But there is time to build public support for lab-grown meat. Before any such creation is sold for food in the U.S. it will have to pass rigorous screening by the Food and Drug Administration.

Beef is not the first food animal to be grown in a lab. A fast-growing Atlantic salmon still hasn’t gotten out of the hatchery after years of FDA entanglements.

So cows don’t need to mooove over just yet. But perhaps way down the road a simple chemical process will get you that favorite cut of beef.