by Dan Ariely
Van Eelen has been chasing his goal ever since, but it took decades for the science to catch up with his imagination. That began to happen in 1981, when stem cells, which can divide almost endlessly and have the ability to develop into many types of tissue, were discovered in mice. Van Eelen recognized the potential immediately, although there was little initial interest in turning muscle cells into meat. By then he was used to rejection, and he persisted. Finally, in 1999, more than half a century after he attended the lecture that fueled his quest, he received US and international patents for the Industrial Production of Meat Using Cell Culture Methods. For the first time, serious people began to take him seriously. Pointing to the channel waters outside his window, van Eelen said, “For all those years, there was not one gram of meat made. At times, I wanted to jump right into that river.”
He no longer feels that way, and for good reason: a new discipline, propelled by an unlikely combination of stem-cell biologists, tissue engineers, animal rights activists, and environmentalists, has emerged in both Europe and the United States. The movement started fitfully but intensified when, in 2001, NASA funded an experiment, led by Morris Benjaminson, that focused on producing fresh meat for space flights. Benjaminson, a biological engineer at Touro College, in New York, cut strips of flesh from live goldfish and submerged them in a nutrient bath extracted from the blood of unborn cows. Within a week, the fish pieces had grown by nearly 15 percent. While the results were not meat, they demonstrated that growing food outside the body was possible. Then in 2004, after continued lobbying from van Eelen, the Dutch government awarded 2 million euros to a consortium of universities and research facilities in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Eindhoven. Though the grant was small, it has helped turn the Netherlands into the in-vitro-meat world’s version of Silicon Valley.
Van Eelen was not the only man undaunted by indifference to the idea of lab-grown meat. Vladimir Mironov, an associate professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy at the Medical University of South Carolina, is working on several experiments, most of which focus on finding an efficient way to grow it. Mironov, a well-known tissue researcher, was brought up in Russia and studied at the Max Planck Institute with the pioneering vascular biologist Werner Risau. Then, in the early 1980s, he moved to the United States, where he became intrigued by the possibilities of making meat. “A few years ago, I tried to get a grant,” Mironov told me when I visited his lab in Charleston. “I failed. I tried to get venture capital. Failed again. I tried to approach big companies for funding. Failed again. But slowly, very slowly, people are coming around.”
Teams are forming at universities around the world. Some are interested primarily in animal welfare, others in regenerative medicine; still others see lab meat as a potential solution to an environmental crisis. They all share a goal, however: to grow muscle without the use of animals and to produce enough of it to be sold in grocery stores. “This is a no-brainer,” Ingrid Newkirk, the cofounder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told me. Three years ago, the animal rights organization, which has a singular gift for public relations, offered $1 million to the first group that could create “an in-vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh.” More recently, PETA provided funding for Nicholas Genovese, a postdoctoral biological engineer, to work in Mironov’s lab—a sort of PETA fellowship. Newkirk explained, “If people are unwilling to stop eating animals by the billions, then what a joy to be able to give them animal flesh that comes without the horror of the slaughterhouse, the transport truck, and the mutilations, pain, and suffering of factory farming.”
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 2 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, “ChickieNobs” 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 20 percent of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions. That is more than all cars, trains, ships, and planes combined. Cattle consume nearly 10 percent of the world’s freshwater resources, and 80 percent of all farmland is devoted to the production of meat. By 2030 the world will likely consume 70 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 spark plug, and a cow a drill bit.
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 percent 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 eat
ing 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 product 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 World War II and designed to calculate artillery-firing ranges, the computer cost millions of dollars and occupied a giant room in the US Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. “Today, any cell phone or five-dollar watch has a more powerful computer,” Post noted. In the late 1980s, as the Human Genome Project got under way, researchers estimated that sequencing the genome of a single individual would take fifteen years and cost $3 billion. The same work can now be done in twenty-four hours for about $1,000.
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 $150 billion 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 285 million tons of meat every year—90 pounds per person. The global population is expected to rise from 7 billion to more than 9 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 was 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 2 percent 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.”
For at least a century, Eindhoven has been a technical town—first as a base for electronics, then as a center for automobile and truck manufacturing. In the past decade, it has become the capital of the Netherlands’ influential industrial-design movement. When I was there, the city was filled with men and women cycling purposefully through the streets, many in dark clothing and angular eyewear. Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, was once based in the center of town, and the company’s highly respected design center is still there. As architecture, industrial design, engineering, and biology have become increasingly interrelated, Eindhoven became a natural home for the nation’s premier University of Technology. In turn, the university, and particularly its department of biomedical engineering, has become the hub for research into growing meat.
Soon after I arrived, Daisy van der Schaft, a thirty-four-year-old assistant professor, took me to the lab where the meat team conducts most of its experiments. Until recently she concentrated on regenerative medicine, but in vitro meat has begun to occupy increasing amounts of her time and imagination. “On the practical level, there was some grant money,” she said. “And, on the personal level, this is an opportunity to do something worthwhile. But for a scientist, it’s not that big a switch.”
In the past decade, the idea of taking healthy cells from our own bodies and using them to grow replacement parts has moved from a hopeful theory to an increasingly frequent reality. With organ-donor shortages as a powerful incentive, medical researchers have had success in creating whole and partial organs to repair and, in some cases, replace diseased tissues. Scientists have used stem cells to construct windpipes, skin, cartilage, and bone. Biologically engineered bladders have been placed in many patients. (Anthony Atala, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, described, in a talk he delivered at the TED Conference in March, how he had implanted artificially constructed bladders in people who subsequently were healthy for years. While Atala spoke in an auditorium in Long Beach, California, a three-dimensional printer was busy in the background, producing the prototype of a kidney. Instead of ink, however, the printer used layers of cells that it then fused together.) In Tokyo, scientists have developed a technique for wrapping a thin sheet of cardiomyocytes—muscl
e cells that the heart needs in order to beat—around the severely damaged hearts of patients. Once implanted, the sheets, beating independently, act like an extra battery. Such successes have helped spark interest in the meat project, because the skills required to fashion an organ from stem cells are similar to those needed to make minced meat or sausage in a petri dish.
Van der Schaft handed me a starched white coat and pointed to a row of incubators—delivery rooms used by researchers to grow cells and tissues of all kinds. “It’s an exciting project,” she said as she reached into an incubator and removed one of many small Plexiglas boxes. “A hopeful project.” Each box contained six disks filled with muscle cells. The cells, gelatinous brown smears resting between identical Velcro beds filled with nutrients, were nearly impossible to see without a microscope. “This is what I have to show you right now,” she said, grimacing. “They did tell you we didn’t have meat as such, right?” I had been duly informed. The team learned long ago that visitors feel cheated when they realize that there will be no lunch of faux chicken or vat-ripened pork. Despite the warning, I felt cheated too.
Nearly every person I told that I was working on this piece asked the same question: What does it taste like? (And the first word most people blurted out to describe their feelings was “Yuck.”) Researchers say that taste and texture—fats and salt and varying amounts of protein—can be engineered into lab-grown meat with relative ease. For the moment, taste remains a secondary issue, because so far the largest piece of “meat” that has been produced in Eindhoven measured 8 millimeters long, 2 millimeters wide, and 400 microns thick. It contained millions of cells but was about the size of a contact lens. The specimen I saw was as visually stimulating as mouse droppings, and if such a substance can be said to look like anything, it looked like a runny egg. How, I wondered, could those blobs ever feed anyone?