"Of course if you say to people, ‘We are going to grow meat in a lab - are you going to eat it?�??, they will say ‘No�??. But let�??s rephrase that question: if, 20 years from now, you go to a supermarket and find two pieces of meat. They look, feel and taste exactly the same - and they have the same price. Yet one piece is subject to eco-tax - because it was cultured under environmentally unfriendly conditions. It was produced as an animal. For the other product, the quality is guaranteed because it comes out of a lab, is always exactly the same, and no animals have suffered for it. What are you going to chose? I would even go one step further. I can imagine that 40, 50 years from now, it will be forbidden to produce meat using animals.
At the moment, we are, of course, still nowhere near that scenario. Our problem up until last year has been that nobody even wanted to fund this project. We have to thank Willem van Eelen for his enthusiasm and perseverance for making this happen. We are now funded by a philanthropist. So now we decided: Hey, with the current technology, it is not ideal and not efficient, but we can actually make a real product. And if we can do that, perhaps companies will become sufficiently interested and start funding this on a larger scale. The idea has to become part of the public domain.
The first phase of our procedure is to take a biopsy from a cow. Then we extract adult stem cells specific to skeletal muscle and allow them to proliferate for a couple of weeks. We seed those onto into a gel and provide anchor points within the Petri dish, so that the cells organize the gel in between the anchor points in a structure similar to muscle. The cells do this all by themselves. The anchor points are essential because tension develops between the cells at the same time. This is a strong stimulus for the muscle cells to differentiate and to produce protein. So we need to do quite a lot in parallel to make sufficient progress and produce a sufficient volume of this stuff material in order to be able to grow a whole hamburger within a reasonable period of time.
Once we get there, we will have a result that looks, tastes and feels, and actually is meat - and nothing else. It is not artificial, just cultured. It is meat, just grown outside of the body. All of this is done with adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. We do no cloning in the sense of cloning an entire organism, we do not genetically modify - we do nothing with these cells other than feed them and provide the right conditions. It is just a different way of growing the same cells. And if all the conditions that we aim for are met, this could have an enormous impact on the environment. Water use for producing meat could be reduced by 40 percent, energy use by 60 percent, and land use by as much as 90 percent."
