Test-Tube Meat May Be En Route to Dinner Table

Dutch scientists are working on growing artificial pork out of pig stem cells. Efforts to mass-produce it are underway.
This use of stem cells may have the unintended effect of uniting militant vegans and evangelical right-to-life’ers.

Wired News:

What if the next burger you ate was created in a warm, nutrient-enriched soup swirling within a bioreactor?

Edible, lab-grown ground chuck that smells and tastes just like the real thing might take a place next to Quorn at supermarkets in just a few years, thanks to some determined meat researchers. Scientists routinely grow small quantities of muscle cells in petri dishes for experiments, but now for the first time a concentrated effort is under way to mass-produce meat in this manner.

Henk Haagsman, a professor of meat sciences at Utrecht University, and his Dutch colleagues are working on growing artificial pork meat out of pig stem cells. They hope to grow a form of minced meat suitable for burgers, sausages and pizza toppings within the next few years.

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From Wired News / Tissue Genesis

Above, muscle tissue engineered from single muscle cells harvested from rats. Tissue engineers Paul Kosnik and Robert Dennis used a scaffold-free method to engineer muscle tissue that has the same basic form as a muscle from an animal grown for meat.