The world’s first lab-grown burger could be ready by October

According to Mark Post, the head of physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, all that stands between you and a juicy lab-grown hamburger are $315,000 and celebrity status. Post says that by October, his team will be ready to put their £200,000 creation before a real live celebrity taste-tester. The burger would be the result of a project funded by an anonymous donor that involves taking stem cells from cows and growing them in a culture with fetal calf serum, according to the Guardian. Post believes lab-grown meat could drastically reduce the number of cows at factory farms, which would mean fewer greenhouse gas emissions and less animal suffering. According to the Guardian, Post and his team have made “thin sheets of cow muscle measuring three centimetres long, 1.5 centimetres wide and a half a milimetre thick.” By the newspaper’s math, it would take about 3,000 pieces of muscle and hundreds of pieces of fatty tissue to complete the burger. If all of this sounds a little labour intensive—and if your ceiling for burger-related spending is around $100—fear not: Post thinks most of the scientific legwork is already done, meaning mass production of lab-grown meat could be a scant 10 or 20 years away. Oh, and he also said the process could be used to grow panda meat, which is about the worst PR he could possibly give to his cause. Read the entire story [The Guardian] »

(Images: petri dish, JamesZ_Flickr; burger, Like_the_Grand_Canyon)