LABORATORY CULTURED MEAT?

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August 12. 2005

Dateline Alabama | APN

Laboratory-cultured meat: Home, home on the strange?

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By ALEX DOMINGUEZ

Associated Press Writer

 

August 11, 2005

 

 

While it may be years before laboratory-raised meat hits your store shelf,

researchers say the technology exists now to produce processed meats such as

burgers and sausages, starting with cells taken from cow, chicken, pig, fish or

other animal.

 

Growing meat without the animal would have a number of advantages. It would

reduce the need for the animals - which often are grown in less than ideal

conditions. Meat production is also blamed for a variety of environmental ills.

And cultured meat also could be tailored to be healthier than farm-raised meat,

while satisfying the increasing demand for protein by the world's growing

population, proponents say.

 

Brian J. Ford, a British biologist and the author of " The Future of Food, " said

the widespread acceptance of meat substitutes such as `quorn,' a cultured

fungus, " shows that the time for cultured tissue is near. "

 

Techniques for engineering muscle cells and other tissues were first developed

for medical use. Now a handful of researchers are looking into growing edible

muscle cells, said Jason Matheny, a University of Maryland doctoral student who

co-authored a paper on in vitro meat techniques.

 

Industrializing the process could involve growing muscle cells on large sheets

or beads suspended in a growth medium. The sheet would have to be stretched, or

the beads would have to be able to expand, to stretch the cells and provide the

exercise needed for the cells to develop, he said.

 

" If you didn't stretch them, you would be eating mush. It would be like

pink-colored Jello, " Matheny said.

 

Once the cells have grown enough, they could be scraped off and packaged. If

edible sheets or beads are used, all of it could be eaten.

 

" The technology is there to produce something like a processed meat, you could

produce a heavily processed chicken meat just like, perhaps, a nugget, " Matheny

said.

 

" The technology to produce something like a steak or chicken breast is still

quite a ways off, there's a lot of technological challenge to producing

something that has a structure to it. "

 

Growing a steak, for example, requires more than just muscle cells. Blood

vessels, fat and connective tissue would also have to be grown. If too many

muscle cells grow on top of each other, for example, the cells on the inside of

the muscle mass will no longer be exposed to the nutrients in the growth medium

and will die, Matheny said.

 

In June, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said they had

taken a step toward solving that problem. The researchers, studying the creation

of replacement parts for humans, said they used a mix of cells to grow muscle

tissue that had its own blood vessels. The human tissue was implanted into mice

where they watched blood flow into the engineered muscle.

 

Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson said fish muscles cells cultured at

his laboratory for NASA passed a " sniff panel, " and he believes seafood might be

the first to be laboratory cultured.

 

" We actually did cook the fish meat we grew, " Benjaminson said. " It looked,

according to them, and smelled like the fish you can buy in the supermarket. "

 

However, the panel did not eat the cultured meat, he said.

 

While growing meat in a dish is currently too expensive for anything but space

travel, Benjaminson thinks it is feasible to one day produce a cheaper, tastier,

fishless-stick.

 

" With a little bit of money and time we could produce probably something that

resembles a fish filet, " he said. " There's no reason to think it wouldn't be

just as flaky as any other fish filet. "

 

Crab, shrimp or other shellfish also could be cultured, he said.

 

Dr. Vladimir Mironov, director of the Shared Tissue Engineering Lab at the

Medical University of South Carolina, envisions a countertop device like a bread

machine that could one day produce sausage or hamburger. Instead of flour, water

and yeast, it would need muscle stem cells, a growth medium, and an edible

structure for the cells to grow on, he said.

 

While Benjaminson's research required the fish to be killed to get the muscle

cells needed to start the process, eventually the process could be refined to

allow the use of a cultured cell line or a biopsy so the donor fish could live,

he said.

 

While many growth mediums are animal based, Benjaminson said he has also

developed a mushroom-based growth medium. Researchers at South Dakota State

University have also developed an animal-free medium, Matheny said.

 

If a product is brought to market, Matheny admits he is not sure how consumers

would react.

 

" In some ways, this is a product of biotechnology in the same way bread and wine

and cheese are products of biotechnology, " Matheny said. " You take something

that's found in nature, and reproduce it in a controlled environment. "

 

Ford said many are already turned off by meat because of the miserable lives

many animals suffer. Cultured meat could appeal to those consumers, but it is

not likely to appear in stores soon.

 

" People will take time to get used to the idea, and it will be a slow process of

adaptation, " Ford said.

 

Pitfalls include viruses that could infect meat cultures, he said.

 

If the idea is rushed to market before it is shown to be safe, the public will

be turned against the concept.

 

" That's what has already happened with genetically modified crops, " Ford said.

 

" The idea of cultured meat has great appeal to me, but we must move cautiously. "

 

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