Pork in a petridish: Experts turn stem cells into meat
P, 16 January 2010, 12:33am
LONDON: Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green
alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten the texture quite right, they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.
"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, of Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells. They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps cells replicate to the desired number. So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating 1 cm long strips of meat ; to make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take 30 days of cell replication in the lab.
P, 16 January 2010, 12:33am
LONDON: Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green
alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten the texture quite right, they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.
"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, of Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells. They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps cells replicate to the desired number. So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating 1 cm long strips of meat ; to make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take 30 days of cell replication in the lab.
