8. from #em#Test-Tube Burgers#/em#

8. from Test-Tube Burgers

Michael Specter

In the following essay published in May 2011 in the New Yorker, author Michael Specter discusses the developing science of meat production.

Meat supplies a variety of nutrients—among them iron, zinc, and Vitamin B12—that are not readily found in plants. We can survive without it; millions of vegetarians choose to do so, and billions of others have that choice imposed upon them by poverty. But for at least two million years animals have provided our most consistent source of protein. For most of that time, the economic, social, and health benefits of raising and eating livestock were hard to dispute. The evolutionary biologist Richard Wrangham argues, in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, that the development of a brain that could conceive of cooking meat—a singularly efficient way to consume protein—has defined our species more clearly than any other characteristic. Animals have always been essential to human development. Sir Albert Howard, who is often viewed as the founder of the modern organic-farming movement, put it succinctly in his 1940 mission statement, An Agricultural Testament: “Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock.”

For many people, the idea of divorcing beef from a cow or pork from a pig will seem even more unsettling than the controversial yet utterly routine practice of modifying crops with the tools of molecular biology. The Food and Drug Administration currently has before it an application, which has already caused rancorous debate, to engineer salmon with a hormone that will force the fish to grow twice as fast as normal. Clearly, making meat without animals would be a more fundamental departure. How we grow, prepare, and eat our food is a deeply emotional issue, and lab-grown meat raises powerful questions about what most people see as the boundaries of nature and the basic definitions of life. Can something be called chicken or pork if it was born in a flask and produced in a vat? Questions like that have rarely been asked and have never been answered.

Still, the idea itself is not new. On January 17, 1912, the Nobel Prize–winning biologist Alexis Carrel placed tissue from an embryonic chicken heart in a bath of nutrients. He kept it beating in his laboratory, at the Rockefeller Institute, for more than twenty years, demonstrating that it was possible to keep muscle tissue alive outside the body for an extended period. Laboratory meat has also long been the subject of dystopian fantasy and literary imagination. In 1931, Winston Churchill published an essay, “Fifty Years Hence,” in which he described what he saw as the inevitable future of food: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing.” He added, “Synthetic food will, of course, also be used in the future. Nor need the pleasure of the table be banished. . . . The new foods will from the outset be practically indistinguishable from the natural products.” The idea has often been touched on in science fiction. In Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 novel, artificial meat—called vat-grown flesh—is sold at lower prices than the meat from living animals. In Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, published in 2003, “Chickie-Nobs” are engineered to have many breasts and no brains.

Past discussions have largely been theoretical, but our patterns of meat consumption have become increasingly dangerous for both individuals and the planet. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the global livestock industry is responsible for nearly twenty per cent of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions. That is more than all cars, trains, ships, and planes combined. Cattle consume nearly ten per cent of the world’s freshwater resources, and eighty per cent of all farmland is devoted to the production of meat. By 2030, the world will likely consume seventy percent more meat than it did in 2000. The ecological implications are daunting, and so are the implications for animal welfare: billions of cows, pigs, and chickens spend their entire lives crated, boxed, or force-fed grain in repulsive conditions on factory farms. These animals are born solely to be killed, and between the two events they are treated like interchangeable parts in a machine, as if a chicken were a sparkplug, and a cow a drill bit.

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The consequences of eating meat, and our increasing reliance on factory farms, are almost as disturbing for human health. According to a report issued recently by the American Public Health Association, animal waste from industrial farms “often contains pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, dust, arsenic, dioxin and other persistent organic pollutants.” Seventy per cent of all antibiotics and related drugs consumed in the United States are fed to hogs, poultry, and beef. In most cases, they are used solely to promote growth, and not for any therapeutic reason. By eating animals, humans have exposed themselves to SARS, avian influenza, and AIDS, among many other viruses. The World Health Organization has attributed a third of the world’s deaths to the twin epidemics of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, both greatly influenced by excessive consumption of animal fats.

“We have an opportunity to reverse the terribly damaging impact that eating animals has had on our lives and on this planet,” Mark Post, a professor in the physiology department at Maastricht University, in the Netherlands, told me. “The goal is to take the meat from one animal and create the volume previously provided by a million animals.” Post, who is a vascular biologist and a surgeon, also has a doctorate in pulmonary pharmacology. His area of expertise is angiogenesis—the growth of new blood vessels. Until recently, he had dedicated himself to creating arteries that could replace and repair those in a diseased human heart. Like many of his colleagues, he was reluctant to shift from biomedicine to the meat project. “I am a scientist, and my family always respected me for that,” he said. “When I started basically spending my time trying to make the beginning of a hamburger, they would give me a pitiful look, as if to say, You have completely degraded yourself.”

We met recently at the Eindhoven University of Technology, where he served on the faculty for years and remains a vice-dean. “First, people ask, ‘Why would anyone want to do this?’” he said. “The initial position often seems to be a reflex: nobody will ever eat this meat. But in the end I don’t think that will be true. If people visited a slaughterhouse, then visited a lab, they would realize this approach is so much healthier.” He added, “I have noticed that when people are exposed to the facts, to the state of the science, and why we need to look for alternatives to what we have now, the opposition is not so intense.”

Post, a trim fifty-three-year-old man in rimless glasses and a polo shirt, stressed, too, that scientific advances have been robust. “If what you want is to grow muscle cells and produce a useful source of animal protein in a lab, well, we can do that today,” he said—an assertion echoed by Mironov, in South Carolina, and by many other scientists in the field. To grow ground meat—which accounts for half the meat sold in the United States—one needs essentially to roll sheets of two-dimensional muscle cells together and mold them into food. A steak would be much harder. That’s because before scientists can manufacture meat that looks as if it came from a butcher, they will have to design the network of blood vessels and arteries required to ferry nutrients to the cells. Even then, no producer with a label that said “Born in cell culture, raised in a vat” would be commercially viable until the costs fall.

Scientific advances necessarily predate the broad adoption of any technology—often by years. Post points to the first general-purpose computer, Eniac. Built during the Second World War, and designed to calculate artillery-firing ranges, the computer cost millions of dollars and occupied a giant room in the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. “Today, any cell phone or five-dollar watch has a more powerful computer,” Post noted. In the late nineteen-eighties, as the Human Genome Project got under way, researchers estimated that sequencing the genome of a single individual would take fifteen years and cost three billion dollars. The same work can now be done in twenty-four hours for about a thousand dollars.

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Those numbers will continue to fall as personal genomics becomes more relevant, and, as would be the case with laboratory meat, it will become more relevant if the price keeps falling. “The first hamburger will be incredibly expensive,” Post said. “Somebody calculated five thousand dollars. The skills you need to grow a small amount of meat in a laboratory are not necessarily those that would permit you to churn out ground beef by the ton. To do that will require money and public interest. We don’t have enough of either right now. That I do not understand, because, while I am no businessman, there certainly seems to be a market out there.”

Meat and poultry dominate American agriculture, with sales that exceeded a hundred and fifty billion dollars in 2009. It is unlikely that the industry would cheer on competitors who could directly challenge its profits. Yet, if even a small percentage of customers switched their allegiance from animals to vats, the market would be huge. After all, the world consumes two hundred and eighty-five million tons of meat every year—ninety pounds per person. The global population is expected to rise from seven billion to more than nine billion by the year 2050. This increase will be accompanied by a doubling of the demand for meat and a steep climb in the greenhouse-gas emissions for which animals are responsible. Owing to higher incomes, urbanization, and growing populations—particularly in emerging economies—demand for meat is stronger than it has ever been. In countries like China and India, moving from a heavily plant-based diet to one dominated by meat has become an essential symbol of a middle-class life.

Cultured meat, if it were cheap and plentiful, could dispense with many of these liabilities by providing new sources of protein without inflicting harm on animals or posing health risks to humans. One study, completed last year by researchers at Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, reported that the production of cultured meat could consume roughly half the energy and occupy just two per cent of the land now devoted to the world’s meat industry. The greenhouse gases emitted by livestock, now so punishing, would be negligible. The possible health benefits would also be considerable. Eating meat that was engineered rather than taken from an animal might even be good for you. Instead of committing slow suicide by overdosing on saturated fat, we could begin to consume meat infused with omega-3 fatty acids—which have been demonstrated to prevent the type of heart disease caused by animal fats. “I can well envision a scenario where your doctor would prescribe hamburgers rather than prohibit them,” Post said. “The science is not simple and there are hurdles that remain. But I have no doubt we will get there.”