First hamburger made from lab-grown meat to be served at press conference

Dr Mark Post aims to prove that growing meat in labs could reduce the impact of livestock production on the environment

The guardian.com, Alok Jha, science correspondent, Monday 5 August 2013

Link to video: Can synthetic beef satisfy the world's growing hunger for meat?

Over the weekend, scientists at Dr Mark Post's laboratory in Maastricht University made their final preparations for an event they hope will change the way we see food. On Monday, Dr Post will cook the world's most expensive hamburger, made from meat grown in Petri dishes in his lab.

Starting with stem cells extracted from a biopsy of a cow, Post's team grew 20,000 muscle fibres over the course of three months. Each tiny, hoop-like fibre grew in an individual culture well, suspended in a gel-like growth medium.

When they were ready, the fibres were removed individually by hand, cut open and straightened out. All the fibres were pressed together to form the hamburger – biologically identical to beef but grown in a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow. The total cost so far of the project has been €250,000.

In London on Monday afternoon Post plans to eat the hamburger in front of reporters and anyone else in the world who wants to take a look, via a livestream of the event on the internet. His aim is simple: to show the world that growing real, edible meat in laboratories is no longer a fantasy and that this could be a potential solution to the worsening impact of meat production on our environment.

"Cows are very inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein," Post told the Guardian. "So we need to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food that way. [With cultured meat] we can make it more efficient because we have all the variables under control. We don't need to kill the cow and it doesn't [produce] any methane."

The human appetite for meat means that 30% of the Earth's useable surface is covered by pasture land for animals, compared with just 4% of the surface used directly to feed humans. The total biomass of our livestock is almost double that of the people on the planet and accounts for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions and 40% of methane emissions – a much more potent greenhouse gas.

By 2060, human population is predicted to have risen to 9.5 billion and, with a rising demand for meat from rapidly developing populations in, for example, China and India, the market in meat is expected to double by the middle of the century. If the amount of meat we produce doubles, livestock could be responsible for half as much climate impact as all the world's cars, lorries and airplanes. In 2008, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, urged people to have one meat-free day a week to help curb the rate of global climate change.

Dr Post said that his cultured beef was still undergoing a lifecycle analysis to work out its overall environmental impacts, but early indications were that his lab meat reduced the need for land and water by 90% and overall energy use was cut by 70%.

Though Post's work is at its earliest stages – there are many hurdles before he can scale up the process for large-scale manufacture – he has high hopes for his product. "Twenty years from now if you have a choice in the supermarket between two products that are identical and they taste and feel the same and have the same price – and one is made in an environmentally friendly way with much less resources and provides food security for the population and doesn't have any animal welfare connotations to it – the choice will be relatively easy," he said. "People will start to prefer this type of product and then it will gradually transform meat production."

The hamburger he has made so far is relatively simple, just pure protein. It might be good enough as a proof of concept but it is far from being a seamless replacement for meat. For a start, it has no fat or blood, which is where much of the distinctive flavour of meat comes from.

Next on the agenda, therefore, for Post's team is to add lab-grown fat cells to the protein, perhaps even bone cells for those who want a fully lab-cultured T-bone steak. "The technology now is confined to small pieces because you have to get oxygen and nutrients into the tissue to keep it alive," he said. "For larger pieces we need to develop different technologies that have been described in the medical field but have not been applied to meat production yet." That means building something a bit like blood vessels into the meat, which could provide fluid, oxygen and nutrients to the centre of the tissue as it grows.

Post acknowledges that it will be essential to produce a product that looks and tastes exactly the same as real meat. And if they find there is a market for cultured beef, the same methods could be used to grow other proteins such as chicken, lamb, fish or pork in the lab.

The research (and the carefully arranged public tasting) has been funded by a backer who has chosen to remain anonymous until the press conference, to avoid overshadowing the hamburger itself. Critics might argue that holding a public event to showcase the work instead of presenting results in a peer-reviewed journal could alienate scientific colleagues, who might be sceptical about the work.

Dr Post's response is that most of the methods he is using – involving engineering and growing large numbers of cow stem cells – have already been published in journals. His hamburger, he said, was more a result of brute force in growing more material than anyone else has so far. "From the technological point of view there are very few secrets here," he said.

Monday's event is "a big responsibility", he said. "This is going to make or break the future of cultured beef. This is a good cause to fight for and if in any way this type of approach through the media affects that in a negative way then I would feel bad."

He added: "I'm pretty confident that the product, as we present it on Monday, that people will like it and will say 'this is the way we should go, this is a good direction.'"

Food critic Hanni Ruetzler who tasted the burger: "There is 

quite some intense taste; it's close to meat, but it's not that juicy"

Related Articles:

World's first lab-grown burger is eaten in London

World's first lab-grown burger to be cooked and eaten

Google's Sergey Brin bankrolled world's first synthetic beef hamburger

MacArtificial: do we need it?

Roots breakthrough for drought-resistant rice

"2013 - What Now ?" – Jan 6, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - (Text version)

“… New ideas are things you never thought of. These ideas will be given to you so you will have answers to the most profound questions that your societies have had since you were born. Inventions will bring clean water to every Human on the planet, cheaply and everywhere. Inventions will give you power, cheaply and everywhere. These ideas will wipe out all of the reasons you now have for pollution, and when you look back on it, you'll go, "This solution was always there. Why didn't we think of that? Why didn't we do this sooner?" Because it wasn't time and you were not ready. You hadn't planted the seeds and you were still battling the old energy, deciding whether you were going to terminate yourselves before 2012. Now you didn't…. and now you didn't.

It's funny, what you ponder about, and what your sociologists consider the "great current problems of mankind", for your new ideas will simply eliminate the very concepts of the questions just as they did in the past. Do you remember? Two hundred years ago, the predictions of sociologists said that you would run out of food, since there wasn't enough land to sustain a greater population. Then you discovered crop rotation and fertilizer. Suddenly, each plot of land could produce many times what it could before. Do you remember the predictions that you would run out of wood to heat your homes? Probably not. That was before electricity. It goes on and on.

So today's puzzles are just as quaint, as you will see. (1)How do you strengthen the power grids of your great nations so that they are not vulnerable to failure or don't require massive infrastructure improvement expenditures? Because cold is coming, and you are going to need more power. (2) What can you do about pollution? (3) What about world overpopulation? Some experts will tell you that a pandemic will be the answer; nature [Gaia] will kill off about one-third of the earth's population. The best minds of the century ponder these puzzles and tell you that you are headed for real problems. You have heard these things all your life.

Let me ask you this. (1) What if you could eliminate the power grid altogether? You can and will. (2) What if pollution-creating sources simply go away, due to new ideas and invention, and the environment starts to self-correct? (3) Overpopulation? You assume that humanity will continue to have children at an exponential rate since they are stupid and can't help themselves. This, dear ones, is a consciousness and education issue, and that is going to change. Imagine a zero growth attribute of many countries - something that will be common. Did you notice that some of your children today are actually starting to ponder if they should have any children at all? What a concept! ….”