Business Opportunities Weblog

$345,000 Lab-Grown Hamburger

By on February 14, 2013 in Featured / Inventions

Hamburger

Wired UK:

Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, is about to create a proof-of-concept lab-grown hamburger.

It won’t come cheap — Post reckons it’ll cost around [$345,000] to assemble from thin layers of muscle strips packed together with some lab-grown fat. “The first one will be a proof of concept, just to show it’s possible”, Post told Reuters. “I believe I can do this in the coming year”.

The muscle strips are created from stem cells harvested from leftover material from slaughterhouses (so it’s impossible to describe it as cruelty-free, yet). Post lets them grow in a feed made of sugars, amino acids, lipids and minerals until they’re about 2.5cm long, just under a centimetre wide, and so thin they’re almost transparent. As such, more than 3,000 of them will need to be layered together to approach the thickness of a regular burger. It won’t look like meat, though — as there’s no blood. Instead, it’ll look a bit like scallop flesh, Post says.

Photo by Josh Resnick/ShutterStock.

hamburgers science vegetarians

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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  • http://wahm.business-opportunities.biz Angela Shupe

    The description makes it sound gross. It makes me seriously wonder how it will taste.

  • Stephen Hope

    MMMM, I love scallops (potato wise) however what is the purpose of a lab grown delicacy other than saying I ate one and then if it causes nausea will you have to have a disclaimer label on it? I.e. “Caution the eating of this product may induce nausea and severe grimacing. Grimacing may occur in onlookers who watch someone eating this pseudo-product.” ENJOY!!!

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