LONDON — Scientists say a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat could one day offer an alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger and save some pigs their bacon.
Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven’t gotten the texture right or even tasted the engineered meat, they say the technology promises to have widespread implications.
“If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat,” said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.
Post describes the texture of the meat as sort of like scallop, firm but a little squishy and moist. That’s because the lab meat has less protein content than conventional meat.
In the U.S., similar research was funded by NASA, which hoped astronauts would be able to grow their own meat in space. But after growing disappointingly thin sheets of tissue, NASA gave up and decided it would be better for its astronauts to simply eat vegetarian.
To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs’ muscle cells. They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number.
So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating strips of meat about a half inch long; to make a pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication in the lab.
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