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PETA see the Light – $1 Million Bounty for Test-Tube Meat
By Martin English | April 23, 2008
The animal rights group PETA has announced a $1 million prize for anyone who can create in-vitro meat that looks and tastes like real food with faces by 2012. An announcement on the PETA website states:
“In vitro meat production would use animal stem cells that would be placed in a medium to grow and reproduce. The result would mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten. Some promising steps have been made toward this technology, but we’re still several years away from having in vitro meat be available to the general public…. “
But is the meat real ? Are you a vegetarian if the meat isn’t ‘real’. According to a New York Times report,
the decision to sponsor a prize caused “a near civil war in our office,” since so many PETA members are repulsed by the thought of eating animal tissue, even if no animals are killed.
I’m not a vegetarian, not by any means, but you have to admit that the conversion rate of inputs to edible food of the average cow is pretty poor (even chickens aren’t that much better). With rising food prices, caused by amongst other things, increasing use of bio fuels, we need a more efficient way of producing food.
Unfortunately, in terms of biological and genetic research, 1 Million US dollars isn’t that much. However, it may popularise the idea (similar to the X-Prize) and attract someone with sufficient funding to actually get the work done.
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