While I share Sergey Brin’s concerns about meat production and the completely cruel way in which we treat our animals, I can’t say I’m looking forward to biting into a test tube hamburger any time soon. This story has received a lot of press in the past few days following the synthetic meat’s taste testing in London yesterday. I have to admit, I’d take the entire thing a lot more seriously if Sergey wasn’t wearing those creepy and idiotic Google Glasses while discussing it (watch video):
From The Guardian:
The man who has bankrolled the production of the world’s first lab-grown hamburger has been revealed as Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The internet entrepreneur has backed the project to the tune of €250,000 (£215,000), allowing scientists to grow enough meat in the lab to create a burger – as a proof of concept – that will be cooked and eaten in London on Monday.
“It’s really just proof of concept right now, we’re trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger,” said Brin in a film to mark the tasting event in London. “From there I’m optimistic that we can really scale by leaps and bounds.”
Brin said that he was moved to invest in the technology for animal welfare reasons. People had an erroneous image of modern meat production, he said, imagining “pristine farms” with just a few animals in them. “When you see how these cows are treated, it’s certainly something I’m not comfortable with.”
Brin’s money was used by a team led by physiologist Dr Mark Post at Maastricht University to grow 20,000 muscle fibres from cow stem cells over the course of three months. These fibers were extracted from individual culture wells and then painstakingly pressed together to form the hamburger that will be eaten in London on Monday. The objective is to create meat that is biologically identical to beef but grown in a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow.
Here’s one version of the future I don’t want to see: People running around wearing Google Glass and eating Google lab meat.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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… and in the future consumers will have a choice of two like products that are labeled… (paraphrasing), like the store shelves of labeled “Contains GMO” product and those labeled without? Good info and post, appreciated, just making a point with an aspect mentioned in the video. Somewhat a follow up to the previous post with the young GMO activist taking CBCto task.