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Dutch Growing Pork In Lab
Researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands are trying to grow pork meat in the laboratory.
(Pork grown fresh in the lab)
Professor Bernard Roelen, in the veterinary sciences department at Ultrecht University, is trying to make meat without having to kill animals. Many other steps could be dispensed with, including providing animal feed, transport, vast land use and the methane expelled by animals.
"Keeping animals just to eat them is in fact not so good for the environment,' said Roelen. 'Animals need to grow, and animals produce many things that you do not eat.""I can imagine that some people will have problems with it. People might think it is artificial. But some people might not realise that some part of the meat they eat is artificial."
Science fiction writers have been pushing the idea of artificial meat grown in laboratory environments for years. In his enjoyable novel Four-Day Planet, written in 1961, H. Beam Piper wrote about carniculture, which provided meat without animals.
I went on telling him about our hydroponic farms, and the carniculture plant where any kind of animal tissue we wanted was grown--Terran pork and beef and poultry, Freyan _zhoumy_ meat, Zarathustran veldtbeest.... He knew, already, that none of the native life-forms, animal or vegetable, were edible by Terrans."You can get all the _paté de foie gras_ you want here," I said. "We have a chunk of goose liver about fifty feet in diameter growing in one of our vats."
(Read more about carniculture plants)
Read about other recent attempts to grow meat without animals; see Hungry? Print Yourself Some Bacon and Cultured Meat Straight From The Vat.
Thanks to Miez for the story tip, from Reuters.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/3/2007)
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