Word: meat
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...Monday, the clamorous animal rights group PETA announced it would award $1 million to the first person to come up with a way to make commercially viable in vitro meat by 2012. The fake meat would have to be indistinguishable from the real deal, according to competition rules, and it would have to be cheap enough to succeed in the marketplace...
...theory, this seems like an excellent idea, with the potential to ease the burden on the environment from meat production, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve human health. In practice, however, the chances of anyone actually winning the prize seem slim. "No one has yet produced [in vitro meat]. No one has succeeded in coming close," says Dr. Stig Omholt, director of Norway's Centre for Integrative Genetics and chair of the In Vitro Meat Consortium, which held its first symposium this month. Still, Omholt says, "it seems possible to develop this technology...
...harvested and processed into ground beef, chicken or pork, depending on the origin of the cells. But don't expect to see big, juicy in vitro steaks anytime soon; the technology has not yet been able to synthesize blood vessels or grow large, three-dimensional pieces of meat...
...common misconception. "We use natural cells from natural animals," says Dr. Vladimir Mironov, a tissue engineer and assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. "We don't change Mother Nature, we just try to imitate it." But there's always room for improvement - scientists can design meat, for example, that is high in healthy fats, such as omega 3s and 6s. Creating the meat in a lab also decreases its exposure to bacteria and disease, which have riddled the livestock industry, injuring consumers and causing extensive meat recalls...
...Antibiotics used in agriculture can improve productivity of food animals, but at what risk?” Dantas said. “Are we annulling our only chemotherapeutic treatment against infectious disease because we want to keep our meat...