In the March issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, Ian Christe reports that, thanks to stem-cell research, meat-processing firms hope within the next 10 years to begin selling affordable meat grown in laboratories.
According to Christe, scientists have been growing meat in laboratories for years, using pig stem cells. Early research produced less-than-appetizing results, but in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College secured funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming and succeeded in growing goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. Scientists supported by corporations such as Dutch sausage titan Stegeman are currently fine-tuning the process, and just two weeks are needed to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers.
Unfortunately, lab meat costs approximately $100,000 per kilogram right now, but since this is a scalable process, it takes the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat, says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group.
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1 comment:
Right. So meat will only cost $100 a kilo. That's good.
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