Brendan Koerner questions whether lab-grown meat would be environmentally friendly. The prognosis? Maybe, but not anytime soon:
...don't hold your breath while waiting for your first lab-grown roast. Despite considerable hubbub over the technology in recent months, we're still yearsor, more likely, decadesaway from affordable lab-grown meat. The current experiments are taking place in bioreactors that measure only a few hundred milliliters in volume, and the longest complete muscle tissues are just 2 centimeters long. Researchers are nowhere close to scaling up their production to market-ready levels, to say nothing of market-ready prices. A Dutch team's lab-grown pork, for example, would cost around $45,000 per poundassuming they could make an entire pound of the stuff. Bioreactors may be energy-efficient when compared with cattle, but they're also expensive to design, build, and maintain. They also require highly skilled personnel to manage, in order to preserve aseptic conditions.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2008/05/green-meat-medium-rare/216401/
