Piglet, rejoice: Scientific team in the Netherlands produces in vitro pork (sort of)

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction or, depending on where you stand on the tastiness of meat, nightmares. But, according to the Times of London, it's true: A group of scientists in the Netherlands has successfully grown a product vaguely resembling pork in a petri dish. 

The scientists took cells obtained from the muscle of a live pig and incubated them in a solution derived from the blood of animal fetuses, which allowed the original cells to multiply and form a substance that isn't quite meat -- but it's close. (The research team hopes to create a synthetic substitute to be used in place of the blood-product solution in the future.)

No one has yet tasted the resulting material, which "at the moment is rather like wasted muscle tissue," Mark Post of Eindhoven University, the leader of the scientific team, told The Times. Not exactly appetizing, but Post added that the team plans to work to improve the product's consistency. The team expects that it could lead to lab-grown sausages and other in vitro meat products in as few as five years.

The scientists' research is funded in part by the Dutch government as well as by a commercial sausage manufacturer. It follows similar research funded by NASA a few years ago, in which cells from turkeys and goldfish were successfully cultured in a lab.

Famously, PETA announced earlier this year that it would pay $1 million to any scientist who was able to produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that "has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh" and could be produced in "large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully [sold] at a competitive price in at least 10 states" by June 30, 2012. 

"People are surprised to learn that PETA is interested in lab-grown meat, but we have overcome our own revulsion at flesh-eating to champion a breakthrough that will mean a far kinder world for animals," said the group's president and co-founder, Ingrid Newkirk.

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-- Lindsay Barnett

Photo: A man dressed in a pig suit meant to symbolize swine flu gestures during a performance in a market in Kiev, Ukraine, last month. Credit: Sergei Supinsky / AFP/Getty Images

Comments

[Jess]

Mmmmm... pigs in a petri.

[joe]

i would prefer this "pork" over soylent green.

[El Guapo de la cuidad de Los Angeles]

Can you say "cancer"?

[matthew]

They're people! Soylent green is people!

[dls]

PETA's position on lab-grown meat demonstrates one of the many contradictions and illogics of its politics. In this instance, ersatz 'meat' produced by genetic engineering is supported as morally sound science and the morally preferable political priority. Yet this position requires an uncritical subscription to the idea that genetically engineered 'meat' is safe for consumption and ecologically sound. Neither is proven; and indeed, neither is in any way likely to be the case. The ethics of consuming animals is a vexed question, not least because of the dubious and often dangerous implications of its alternatives.

[Elaine Sloan]

I’m a vegan, but if laboratory-grown meat will spare animals from pain and suffering, help stop the spread of food-borne diseases, and minimize the meat industry’s enormous environmental footprint, than I’m all for it too! But in the meantime, people can enjoy the taste of meat without killing animals, destroying the planet, and getting sick. Many mock meats, including Boca burgers and Morningstar Farms Burger Style Recipe Crumbles, taste remarkably like meat, but without the cruelty, cholesterol, fat, food-borne bacteria, and environmental problems associated with animal products.

[JenJen]

The potential of in vitro meat is huge. Not only as a way to produce meat without cruelty to animals, but also to produce niche meats that you can't really get anymore like abalone. Also, once we know how to make "regular" meat in vitro, there's no reason it couldn't also be engineered to be healthier or easier to work with in the food industry. Imagine yard-wide sheet bacon that makes its own Lipitor.