Scientists aren’t quite there yet with invisibility cloaks and bullet proof skin and hover boards.
They’ve made some unbelievable advances on all three, and even invented close approximations, but they don’t have anything that we can use to lurk down hallways or enter into combat with, or, you know, hover. At least not yet.
Test tube hamburgers, on the other hand, will be a reality by October of this year.
At least that was the announcement Dutch scientist Mark Post made over the weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver.
By “test tube hamburger” Post means just that: a ground beef-substance grown in a lab using a cows’ stem cells. He claimed that by fall “we have committed ourselves to make a couple of thousand of small tissues, and then assemble them into a hamburger.”
Their reasons for creating these edible flesh growths are varied and positive, at least on the surface. According to Raw Story:
Conventional meat and dairy production requires more land, water, plants and disposal of waste products than almost all other human foods, they said.
The global demand for meat is expected to rise by 60 percent by 2050, said American scientist Nicholas Genovese, who organized the symposium.
And that doesn’t even touch on problems of animal cruelty or how factory farms’ overuse of antibiotics may eventually cause a drug-resistant strain of bacteria that will end civilization.
“Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing global catastrophe,” said Patrick Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine, who, unlike Post, is devoting his life to making products that taste just like meat out of plants.
“More to the point, it’s incredibly ready to topple … it’s inefficient technology that hasn’t changed fundamentally for millennia.”
Viruses and cruelty and global ruin are wholly unappetizing, yes, but so are “test tube hamburgers” and what follows—“petri dish chicken nuggets” and “vial beef jerky.” I don’t know what the answer is, but it just makes me want to watch this Chipotle commercial on repeat.
[Image via Shutterstock]
