After the test tube baby its Test Tube Burger...

After the so called test tube babies in the world now it’s time for you to taste the all new Test tube Burger. The world's first laboratory-grown beef burger was flipped out of a Petri dish and into a frying pan on Monday, with food tasters declared it’s taste "close to meat." It will be available to you at whooping cost of 250,000 euros ($332,000).

A team, led by Prof Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands, developed it with the help of cow cells and calf serum. Since we can only extract a limited number of stem cells from cows without killing them so the scientists say with time we will be able to find the most efficient way of taking such cells, without killing the cows.

He said: “Eventually my vision is that you have a limited herd of donor animals in the world that you keep in stock and that you get your cells form there. After that each animal will be able to produce about a million times more meat through such technique than through traditional method of butchery.”

According to the scientists, making a complete burger will require 3,000 strips of muscle tissue, each of which measures about three cm long by 1.5 cm wide, with a thickness of half—a—millimetre and takes six weeks to produce.

Synthetic meat could be a great moral advance for the society. Main aim is to reduce the number of cattle slaughtering and cattle farming (one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions). Though later on it won’t involve killing but still it won't be suitable for vegetarians because it still originates in meat by-products.


Akshay Ratnawat,

Delhi University.