Scientist to eat lab-grown beefburger

[Sagan]

Source: The Guardian

Scientist to eat lab-grown beefburger

Alok Jha, science correspondent
The Guardian, Friday 2 August 2013 16.22 BST

On Monday, just after lunchtime, Dr Mark Post will make culinary (and scientific) history by cooking a beefburger and eating it. Which sounds mundane except that this burger cost €250,000 to make and has been painstakingly assembled from meat grown in his laboratory at Maastricht University.

Post's burger will be constructed this weekend from tens of thousands of strands of protein grown, in petri dishes, from cattle stem cells. These cultured muscle fibres will be taken out of deep freeze and carefully knitted together to make Monday's culinary milestone.

The event will be the culmination of years of research to demonstrate that meat grown in culture dishes in the lab can one day be a viable alternative to meat from livestock. If it can be made to work, cultured meat holds the potential to feed the world's growing human population without the devastating environmental impacts of farming ever more animals.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2...own-beefburger

[Sagan]

Except that this burger cost €250,000 to make
and has been painstakingly assembled from meat grown in his laboratory at Maastricht University.

Sure, that sounds expensive, but with 10 more years of research,
they can get that price down to just €10,000.