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Over the weekend, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University announced that his team of researchers has gotten one step closer to making lab-grown hamburgers.
Right now, the process takes the better part of a year and costs over $330,000, but the hope is to scale up production after the proof of concept and start churning out lab-grown patties to feed the world.
There are still a few kinks in the system, though. The meat has a "pinkish-yellow" tinge, it has to be grown in thousands of 3cm x 1.5cm strips and then ground together with a separate batch of tiny lab-grown fat strips to imitate the natural fat-meat combination of beef (which means no lab-grown steak--yet), and the scaled-up process would likely still involve some animal slaughter to provide the stem cells with bases from which to grow. But the meat grown from one cow's cells would weigh "about a million times more" than the meat from the actual cow.
To add a little pizazz to the whole semi-gross operation, Heston Blumenthal has agreed to cook the first burger made from the lab meat. So this coming October, one lucky "mystery guest" will boldly go where no burger eater has gone before (though we're guessing Blumenthal will sneak a bite or two before plating the thing).
[via Telegraph, Guardian]
Over the weekend, Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University announced that his team of researchers has gotten one step closer to making lab-grown hamburgers.
Right now, the process takes the better part of a year and costs over $330,000, but the hope is to scale up production after the proof of concept and start churning out lab-grown patties to feed the world.
There are still a few kinks in the system, though. The meat has a "pinkish-yellow" tinge, it has to be grown in thousands of 3cm x 1.5cm strips and then ground together with a separate batch of tiny lab-grown fat strips to imitate the natural fat-meat combination of beef (which means no lab-grown steak--yet), and the scaled-up process would likely still involve some animal slaughter to provide the stem cells with bases from which to grow. But the meat grown from one cow's cells would weigh "about a million times more" than the meat from the actual cow.
To add a little pizazz to the whole semi-gross operation, Heston Blumenthal has agreed to cook the first burger made from the lab meat. So this coming October, one lucky "mystery guest" will boldly go where no burger eater has gone before (though we're guessing Blumenthal will sneak a bite or two before plating the thing).
[via Telegraph, Guardian]
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