A nearly transparent man-made steak with a clear vein and vibrating in a petri dish. The scenes in this movie may become a reality in October this year. Mark Post, Ph.D., a bioengineer at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, is leading the team and has been working hard to create the first "artificial meat" in history.
Post's laboratory has an oversized thermostatic chamber. The inside of the petri dish lies a thin stream of transparent meat fibers, each about 3 cm long and about 1.5 cm wide. The production of such a fiber requires 5 million cells. And every 3,000 pieces of meat fiber can synthesize burger-sized pieces of meat. Post said that the first "artificial meat" to be made into a burger would require 250,000 euros (about 308,000 US dollars) and occupy two technicians for a full year.
"Making meat" research across the century
As early as 80 years ago, scientists had started to create "artificial meat" ideas.
The Dutch doctor William Van Allen is a pioneer of "artificial meat." He devoted himself to related research in the 1950s and applied for a technology patent for stem cell meat production in 1999. After five years, the project has nothing left. Mironov, a researcher at the University of South Carolina Medical School in the United States, used artificial animal meat to extract animal myoblasts. After more than 10 years, he immersed the myoblasts extracted from turkeys in bovine serum in 2011 and developed turkey. But the turkey he cultivated was drier and lacked the juicy taste of natural turkey. And NASA has also started "artificial meat" experiments since the 1990s in order to allow astronauts to eat non-perishable meat products.
Despite this, there is still a voice in the scientific community that insisting on artificial meat is feasible and necessary. According to estimates by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, by 2050, the global population may reach 9 billion. Given that the future scale of farming may not be able to meet the requirements of all people to eat meat, the “meat shortage†is on the rise.
Nicholas Janowis, a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri, also supports artificial meat projects. He pointed out that most meat products will be contaminated with bacteria, and laboratory artificial meat produced in a sterile environment will neither carry, spread pathogens, or cause infectious diseases.
Technical difficulties accompany ethical questions
In order to be considered as a true “meatâ€, artificial meat has two levels to pass: First, the production process must be efficient and be able to par with the efficiency of pigs, cattle and sheep. The second is that the taste and texture must be exactly the same as the existing meat. These two levels brought difficulties and doubts to artificial meat.
Dr. Post's team used adult animal muscle stem cells and is currently dividing 20 to 30 times. In other words, 1 cell can be split into 1 million. However, due to the limited number of splits, Post's meat is still very small, and it will take time to reach the "artificial meat" standard. For this reason, Post thought of using electricity to stimulate cells and promote its readjustment. He even wanted to transform the meat into a doughnut shape, but the end result will not be revealed until October.
Jeff Wood of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom raised questions from the perspective of taste. He believes that the taste of artificial meat can be used to make dishes with heavier sauces, such as ground beef in pasta, but it is very difficult for laboratories to produce whole pieces of meat such as lamb chops or steaks. Post also took into consideration the problem of taste, and started two new projects. One is to cultivate adipose tissue, and the other is to increase the content of myoglobin in meat and improve the taste of meat.
Robert Sparrow, an ethic scholar at Monash University in Australia, believes that scientists are imagining and ignoring the social and emotional significance of food. “What really should be done is to restore the diversity of food production and adopt more ecological and friendly agricultural production. the way."
Because of technical difficulties and ethical questions, research on artificial meat is difficult to raise funds. However, Post revealed that he has received funding from an American and his identity will be made public in October this year.
In October this year, a well-known chef will cook Borst’s “artificial meat†in front of global media. By then, all mysteries will reveal the answer. (Fu Shengyu)
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