Test Tube Burgers?

April 25, 2008

I’ll be honest. One of the big reasons that I’m a former vegetarian is that, despite my nagging guilt about eating something with a disturbingly cute face and my concerns about the serious environmental problems caused by raising massive numbers of animals for food, I finally just got sick of a steady diet of tofu burgers. You can slather them in mustard, mayonnaise and/or barbecue sauce, top them with a big juicy slice of vine-ripened tomato, and wash them down with a sip of Fosters’ new environmentally-friendly lager, whose brewing process uses a microbial fuel-cell process to generate energy from the byproducts. But despite all that taste bud obfuscation, when it comes down to it, you’re still chewing on bean curd.

But at last, there may be a near-future solution for those of us who are reluctant carnivores. Instead of raising and slaughtering animals for their flesh, what if the muscle cells that make up meat were cultured and grown in big vats in laboratory-factories?

The idea has been around for quite a while. Back in the late 1980s, the late academic and futurist  Michael Hooker went around giving speeches in which he predicted that in vitro meat would be a staple of the 21st century. The actual science to support the notion came along a decade or so later, when Touro College bioengineer Morris Benjaminson and colleagues successfully took chunks of muscle tissue from a goldfish, immersed them in a vat of nutrient-rich liquid, and succeeded in growing miniature fish fillets. As this 2002 New Scientist article details, the Benjaminson and his research team actually went a bit further to test the artificial food’s palatability:

To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments. "We wanted to make sure it'd pass for something you could buy in the supermarket," he says. The results look promising, on the surface at least. "They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," says Benjaminson.

Benjaminson envisioned in vitro meat as a potential food source for NASA astronauts on lengthy space voyages, but animal rights activists quickly glommed onto the concept as well. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has offered a $1 million reward to the first scientist who can develop a palatable synthetic meat and sell it to the public by 2012. As part of the contest, PETA proposes holding a taste test, using a cruelty-free fried chicken recipe. 

Others are proposing in vitro meat as the solution for feeding the world’s burgeoning population without further straining the environment. Norway recently hosted the first-ever In Vitro Meat Symposium, at which researchers released a European study projecting that synthetic meat could be produced for a little more than $5,000 a ton, a cost that would make it competitive with meat from animals. Along these lines, Dutch researchers are forging ahead with efforts to grow ersatz pork chops (here’s a Reuters article on that).

In this country, New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization, is working to fund research and development of meat substitutes. (Here’s New Harvest’s FAQ on in vitro meat.) New Harvest co-founder and director, Jason Matheny, thinks that manufactured meat could be in supermarkets within a decade. In an email, he argues that it will be vastly better for us, in a variety of ways:

Cultured meat has the potential to be healthier, safer, less polluting, and more humane than conventional meat. Fat content can be more easily controlled. The incidence of foodborne disease can be significantly reduced, thanks to strict quality control rules that are impossible to introduce in modern animal farms, slaughterhouses, or meat packing plants. Inedible animal structures (bones, respiratory system, digestive system, skin, and the nervous system) need not be grown. As a result, cultured meat production should be more efficient than conventional meat production in its use of energy, land, and water; and it should produce less waste. Since meat production is responsible for even more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire transportation sector, it's critical that we develop a more efficient alternative.

Perhaps the biggest question: How eager will we all be to pick up a package of synthetic ground sirloin patties and throw them on the grill? Are we willing to eat something that was nurtured in a nutrient-rich solution, rather than on pasture grass? Are we willing to embrace and consume something unnatural, for the sake of the planet? Or does the very idea of synthetic food conjure up unappetizing memories of the late Charlton Heston revealing the actual ingredients of Soylent Green? Express your opinion below.

Should Humans Be Cloned?

February 01, 2008

If you’re uneasy about the FDA’s recent decision that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe for human consumption, this story is really going to rock your world. Stemagen, a La Jolla, Calif.-based private-sector stem cell research company, has announced that its scientists have for the first time created a human embryo by cloning adult cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same process used to create cloned animals.

You may be thinking that you’ve heard this before, because you have. Back in 2004, South Korean scientists announced that they not only had created a human embryo via cloning but had successfully extracted stem cells from it. After their work could not be replicated, lead scientist Hwang Woo-Suk was forced to admit that the results had been fabricated.

As a result, Stemagen seems to have taken extra care to document its findings, an article accepted by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Stem Cells. The researchers had an independent lab do DNA fingerprinting to prove that the embryos were true clones of the cells from which they originated.

Stemagen chief executive Dr. Samuel H. Wood, who doubled as a donor of the cells from which some of the embryos were cloned, describes the project as “a critical milestone in the development of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for human therapeutic use, potentially including developing treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.”

But not everybody is going to hail this as a breakthrough. The idea of creating an embryonic clone of a person in order to harvest stem cells — and then discarding the clone — is abhorrent to opponents of most conventional embryonic stem cell research, who consider the destruction of an embryo to be murder. Even those who aren’t outright opposed raise some potentially troubling questions. For example, bioethicist and blogger Arthur Caplan writes:

In the paper announcing the breakthrough, the authors note that they got three out of 25 attempts at clones to turn into human clone embryos. That is a success rate of about 10 percent. Even if that success rate improves in the future, it still means that six or more eggs are going to be required for a researcher to make a stem cell from a clone made from the DNA of one of your own cells.

Where will hundreds of thousands of eggs come from when hundreds of thousands seek cures? Will we pay poor women to create them? Egg-farming, using powerful drugs with serious risks, may not be the most humane way to ask a poor woman to earn a living.

And although this obviously isn’t the Stemagen scientists’ intention, some undoubtedly worry that the process will be used to produce human infants who are perfect genetic duplicates of a cell donor. (It may already have happened, if you buy the 2004 claim of a mysterious outfit named Clonaid that it actually had produced 13 cloned human children; skeptical New York Times journalists pointed out that the company was founded by the leader of a sect that preaches space travelers originally populated Earth through cloning.) If such cloning proved feasible and the process was widely available, would people resort to cloning in an attempt to make themselves (or at least their genetic blueprint) immortal? Or would companies obtain cell samples from the most productive workers and use them to create a generation of super employees who would bump those of us with conventional origins into the unemployment line? Would human clones have the same civil rights as their progenitors? What if terrorists used cloning to create an endless supply of suicide bombers? That all may sound crazy,  but crazy things sometimes happen.

What’s your opinion on human cloning? Say your piece here.

Human-Animal Hybrids

October 19, 2007

Back in 2006, you probably were as startled as we were when President George W. Bush, during his State of the Union address, implored Congress to bar scientists from “creating human-animal hybrids.” Not accustomed to having our commander in chief veer off on a tangent that sounded suspiciously reminiscent of a plot line from The X-Files, Americans reacted with a mix of puzzlement and derision. Within a day, Technorati.com listed “human-animal hybrid” as the second-most popular search on the Internet, and a Web-based vendor was offering T-shirts emblazoned with a man-monkey so that wearers could  “help President Bush raise awareness about these terrible half man / half beasts.”

As it turns out, Bush wasn’t actually envisioning a nightmarish race of what sci-fi writers refer to as parahumans. Instead, he was up in arms about the possibility of scientists combining human genetic material with animal eggs to produce hybrid embryos, which then could be harvested for stem cells — a possible way of getting around political and religious conservatives’ opposition to the harvesting of stem cells from leftover human embryos from fertility clinics. (Back in 2001, Bush essentially barred the federal government from funding such research, unless scientists relied upon a limited number of existing stem cell lines.)

The controversy has been revived by the recent decision of the U.K.’s Embryology Authority to propose that British scientists be permitted to create hybrid embryos as a source of stem cells, which may possibly provide eventual treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other conditions. Opponents of such research, in a peculiar twist, are winding their way back to what we thought our president was talking about. As the Times of London reported in June, they’re arguing that if scientists are allowed to create human-animal hybrid embryos, in the interests of preserving life, the embryos should then be implanted in women and carried to term, rather than being destroyed. The conceivable result: a generation of infants that are mostly human but also part animal.

So what do you think? Should scientists be permitted to create human-animal embryos, but only for research purposes? Or should they be allowed to go even further, and create manimals? Post your comments below.