To culture meat, scientists cut a small piece of muscle from a pig or fish, or use a few cells cultured in a lab. (Popular starters include embryonic myoblasts, which are cells destined to become muscle cells, or adult muscle "satellite" cells, which help muscle recover from injuries.) The cells are placed in a dish or bioreactor then "fed" with a fluid containing a combination of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, sugars, salts and growth factors.
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Growing meat in a lab sounds far-fetched, but some scientists see it as an inevitable evolution. Whether it's practical remains to be seen.
Medicine | IN THE LAB
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday June 16, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Petri meat: A May 22 Health article about attempts to grow meat in the laboratory said that chicken heart muscle was grown in a flask for more than 30 years. In fact, scientists later concluded that the culture was probably contaminated with new cells.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday June 19, 2006 Home Edition Health Part F Page 7 Features Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Petri meat: A May 22 Health story about attempts to grow meat in the laboratory said that chicken heart muscle was grown in a flask for more than 30 years. In fact, scientists later concluded that the culture was likely contaminated with new cells.
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Early success came in 2002, when Touro College biology professor Morris Benjaminson reported growing fish meat in the lab. He and his colleagues cultured the flesh using pieces of muscle tissue (about 20 square centimeters) harvested from anesthetized, living goldfish.
The tissues were doused with fibroblasts (cells that form connective tissue), incubated and nourished with either fetal cow serum, \o7maitake \f7or shiitake mushroom extract or fish meal.
Within a week, the fish muscles increased up to 89% in size.
Collaborator James Gilchriest, also a researcher at Touro, marinated a batch of the cultured fish -- which the researchers said "resembled fresh fish fillets" -- in olive oil, lemon and garlic before breading and deep-frying them.
"It smelled good," said Benjaminson, but neither researcher subjected the results to a taste-test. They didn't want to run afoul of Food and Drug Administration food safety regulations.
Since 2002, several other laboratories have reported promising results.
Despite many scientists' skepticism, some entrepreneurs think the technology will prove perfect for items such as like sausages and chicken nuggets within as little as five years. Curing, smoking, spicing, grinding and additives can significantly transform (or disguise) the taste and texture of meat that goes into such processed products, says Jason Matheny, co-founder of Vive Inc., a newly-formed, Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech company devoted to lab-cultured meat.
Researchers are also trying to bring down cost: In vitro meat now runs $1,000 to $5,000 a pound to produce. Making it affordable will require cheaper nutrient sources and automating the growth process.
Vladimir Mironov, an associate professor at the Medical University of South Carolina who co-authored last year's Tissue Engineering paper, said that in an era of bird flu, mad cow disease, increasing population densities and ambitions to travel to Mars, "tissue-engineered meat is the inescapable future of humanity."
Meat scientist Killefer does agree on one point: In vitro meat may be perfect for space travel. "It's just not feasible to take cattle and pigs into space, with all of their associated feed," he says.
But he and other meat scientists doubt the technology will meet the demands of the consumer market any time soon, if ever. Cost and safety are major concerns.
Image is another issue: "Some folks are going to think this is like growing bacteria in a beaker in a lab," Killefer says.
Mironov concurs: "Food consumption is a conservative cultural phenomenon. It can take several generations to change."
