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Mad Science? Growing Meat Without Animals
LiveScience ^ | 11/19/2001 | Charles Q. Choi

Posted on 11/19/2009 9:20:24 AM PST by presidio9

Winston Churchill once predicted that it would be possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat and say it will one day be possible to produce steaks in vats, sans any livestock.

Pork chops or burgers cultivated in labs could eliminate contamination problems that regularly generate headlines these days, as well as address environmental concerns that come with industrial livestock farms.

However, such research opens up strange and perhaps even disturbing possibilities once considered only the realm of science fiction. After all, who knows what kind of meat people might want to grow to eat?

Advantages touted

Increasingly, bioengineers are growing nerve, heart and other tissues in labs. Recently, scientists even reported developing artificial penis tissue in rabbits. Although such research is meant to help treat patients, biomedical engineer Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues suggest it could also help feed the rising demand for meat worldwide.

The researchers noted that growing skeletal muscle in labs - the kind people typically think of as the meat they eat - could help tackle a number of problems:

Avoiding animal suffering by reducing the farming and killing of livestock. Dramatically cutting down on food-borne ailments such as mad cow disease and salmonella or germs such as swine flu, by monitoring the growth of meat in labs. Livestock currently take up 70 percent of all agricultural land, corresponding to 30 percent of the world's land surface, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Labs would presumably require much less space. Livestock generate 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of the vehicles on Earth,

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...


TOPICS: Extended News; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: animalrightswackos; eugenics; food; frankenfoods; junkscience; meat; meatismurder; peta; soylentgreen; starkravingsocialism
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To: presidio9

Soylent Green comes to mind.


21 posted on 11/19/2009 10:05:30 AM PST by Trig75
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To: presidio9

Sounds repulsive to me.


22 posted on 11/19/2009 10:06:42 AM PST by pgkdan ( I miss Ronald Reagan!)
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To: presidio9

PETA strangely is down with lab meat and even has a million dollar award for the first quack scientist who can make a decent copy of a burger.


23 posted on 11/19/2009 10:06:57 AM PST by BigGaloot
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To: Between the Lines

No kidding...who wants a rabbit penis? How’s that going to help people?


24 posted on 11/19/2009 10:11:28 AM PST by pgkdan ( I miss Ronald Reagan!)
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To: BigGaloot
PETA should be pleased.
Now you can eat your cow and have it too.
25 posted on 11/19/2009 10:14:51 AM PST by IronKros (The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup)
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To: presidio9

“It tastes like despair.”


26 posted on 11/19/2009 10:15:26 AM PST by edge10 (Obama lied, babies died!)
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To: Trig75

IT’S PEOPLE!

“In principle, we could harvest the meat progenitor cells from fresh human cadavers and grow meat from them,” Post said. “Once taken out of its disease and animalistic, cannibalistic context - you are not killing fellow citizens for it, they are already dead - there is no reason why not.”


27 posted on 11/19/2009 10:32:32 AM PST by calico_thompson
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To: Hang'emAll

Skeletal muscle tissue - heck no - we want brains.


28 posted on 11/19/2009 10:35:32 AM PST by calico_thompson
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To: presidio9

http://www.moviesoundclips.net/movies1/wildhogs/man.wav


29 posted on 11/19/2009 10:40:06 AM PST by WOBBLY BOB (ACORN:American Corruption for Obama Right Now)
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To: presidio9

“possible to grow chicken breasts and wings more efficiently without having to keep an actual chicken. And in fact scientists have since figured out how to grow tiny nuggets of lab meat....”

Lab meat? LOL, gives a new meaning to ‘nuggets’ doesn’t it. Ummm....no thanx Ill pass on the lab meat stuff.


30 posted on 11/19/2009 10:40:36 AM PST by 556x45
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To: Between the Lines
Penis meat??? These two sentences do not belong in the same paragraph. ***

Why not?


31 posted on 11/19/2009 11:07:43 AM PST by Ruy Dias de Bivar (The sword does not kill. It is a tool in the killer's hand.---Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
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To: presidio9

Nothing new. They were growing immitation meat made out of mushrooms grown on cattle blood saturated sawdust thirty years ago.

Tasted just like steak but texture wise it felt like eating mushrooms.


32 posted on 11/19/2009 11:10:56 AM PST by Ruy Dias de Bivar (The sword does not kill. It is a tool in the killer's hand.---Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
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To: presidio9

Anyone remember a si fi short story from the 1960s about a South American scientist, in an anti war/anti meat world, who was raising tomatoes that tasted like beef? He called them “Greenbeffos”.


33 posted on 11/19/2009 11:15:51 AM PST by Ruy Dias de Bivar (The sword does not kill. It is a tool in the killer's hand.---Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
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To: presidio9

Growing meat without animals.

Next thing you know, they’ll be able to make a baby with a man or a woman.


34 posted on 11/19/2009 12:02:39 PM PST by UCANSEE2
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To: presidio9

Oops.

Next thing you know, they’ll be able to make a baby WITHOUT a man or a woman.


35 posted on 11/19/2009 12:03:23 PM PST by UCANSEE2
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To: Hang'emAll
If it doesn’t have a face, I don’t want to eat it.

Waddayamean you don't like yo cultured yeastchop?!? Yo momma slaved over a reconstituter fo 40 seconds to put dat Not-A-Meat on yo plate! Now shaddap an EAT IT!

36 posted on 11/19/2009 1:01:42 PM PST by ApplegateRanch (Islam: a Satanically Transmitted Disease, spread by unprotected intimate contact with the Koranus.)
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To: Ruy Dias de Bivar

Barney Frank wants his lunch back.


37 posted on 11/19/2009 1:38:11 PM PST by Slings and Arrows ("When France chides you for appeasement, you know you're scraping bottom." --Charles Krauthammer)
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