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Monday, 29 July 2013
It cost more than $380,000 to develop -- and doesn't come with French fries on the side.
But the world's first test-tube burger -- grown in a laboratory from a cow's stem cells -- will be served in London next week.
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The burger, made from
20,000 strips of cultured meat mixed together with lab-grown animal fat,
took nine weeks to grow and cost £250,000 ($384,000) to develop. The
scientist behind the project hopes that laboratory-grown meat could
provide a solution to the problem of increasing global demand for meat
and protein.
Mark Post, from the
University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, spent two years researching
the initiative. "There's no doubt it would be revolutionary in the way
we produce staple food," he said.
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It takes eight to nine
weeks to produce just one stem cell burger. "It depends how much
resources are put into the production of cultured meat. It will always
take this long for cells to multiply, but we could produce a million
burgers in this time if enough resources were being spent on the
production," he said.
According to the World
Health Organization, demand for meat is going to double during the next
40 years but current production methods are not sustainable. Post said
the production of synthetic meat would also help reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, and help address animal welfare problems.
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Scientists believe
artificial meat could be sold in supermarkets within five to 10 years.
"The emphasis is on could," Post cautioned. "Five years might be too
early and 10 years sounds more realistic, if we spend a lot of resources
on pushing the production of cultured meat forward."
His research into
synthetic meat has been funded by the Dutch government, as well as an
anonymous donation of €300,000 ($396,000). The burger will be cooked and
eaten in London next week at a yet undisclosed location in front of an
audience.
"The whole presentation
next week will be a proof of concept," Post said. Of course we're not
there yet to make it an efficient and cheap product. But I want to show
that it can be done so that people see: "Yes you can eat it, yes, it
tastes good.'"
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