Race to serve up artificial chicken for a $1m prize
The Guardian A small group of people will meet in Washington later this year for what they hope will be a lunch to change the world. The meal should consist of fried chicken and nothing else, but while it may look like chicken, have the texture of chicken and even taste like chicken, it will never have lived or breathed.
Five years ago Peta, the world's largest animal welfare group, gave scientists until 30 June 2012 to prove they could make "cultured", or laboratory meat, in commercial quantities. The first scientist to show that artificial chicken can be grown in quantity and be indistinguishable from "real" chicken flesh will be awarded $1m.
Five years ago Peta, the world's largest animal welfare group, gave scientists until 30 June 2012 to prove they could make "cultured", or laboratory meat, in commercial quantities. The first scientist to show that artificial chicken can be grown in quantity and be indistinguishable from "real" chicken flesh will be awarded $1m.
... Leading the race to show that it is possible is Mark Post, head of the department of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Post ... has claimed he will produce a synthetic beefburger this year.Post cannot win the Peta prize because he is working with beef, not chicken, but he has successfully grown strips of meat a few centimetres long. But his work is slow and it is proving hard to grow the meat any thicker or in large quantities.
Another group of scientists, at Utrecht university in the Netherlands, is experimenting with stem cells harvested from embryos. ... I think it is a decade away and we need research money," said Bernard Roelen, professor of veterinary science.
Coming from a different direction is US scientist Vladimir Mironov, ... now working with a Brazilian meat company. Mironov works with tissue engineering and has taken embryonic muscle cells from turkeys, bathed them in a bovine serum and successfully grown muscle tissue, but only in very small quantities.
... the prize of being able to one day grow hundreds of tonnes of meat from stem cells is potentially vast, say animal welfare groups and food manufacturers. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation expects world consumption of meat to double between 2000 and 2050,
... Cultured meat has the added advantage of requiring far less energy and space to grow. Analysis by scientists from Oxford and Amsterdam last year showed the process could be engineered to use only 1% of the land and 4% of the water compared with conventional meat.
... For vegetarians, the prize is less animal suffering. "More than 40bn chickens, fish, pigs and cows are killed every year for food in the US alone, in horrific ways. In vitro meat would spare animals from this suffering," said Peta.
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