Ok, I wasn't meaning to imply there has been no news since 2009, obviously it's being kicked around currently. I just went looking for one piece of hard information, from the wikipedia entry, and came up empty. The "In Vitro Meat Consortium" seems to have consisted of a one-time symposium in 2007 and a study on costs their own website has no record of.
I started following the links in the Huffpo article you note, and it was extremely unedifying- a bunch of other newspaper and Huffpo articles quite short on hard information. So back to google, which turns up an article that seems to document the efforts of the Dutch company you refer to. ft.com . That is a pretty good article, at the popular science level anyway, that doesn't handwave away the costs and difficulties of the endeavor that stand in the way of any practical commercial venture. If you look at that article, you'll note a similarity in the pictures to those in Wharfie's article on (work that might, in the indefinite future, lead to really expensive ) lab-grown transplant organs,
One common thread floating through a lot of the popular articles, including the FT article, is the X-prize style contest promoting this funded by PETA. They have their obvious motives, and that's fine. But from PETA's ethical point of view, just promoting vegetarianism is a better option all around. More energy efficient, cheaper, probably healthier, and a lot greener than our current meat-heavy industrial food production system. Plus, it doesn't require any "and then a miracle occurs" scientific handwaving. A vegetarian world would forestall Malthusian doom a lot more easily that test tube meat, and it'd be a simple rationalization of current food production using existing technology.
I'm not meaning to give you a hard time about this, it's nothing personal, and it's really not that big a deal. I'm generally curious about science, and I like to look things up. What I found out this time around is consistent with my initial gut reaction, it's just not a particularly practical looking direction. It's a little frustrating that I'm so obviously unconvincing in my efforts, but to circle back to to the thread topic, it's not as frustrating as trying to make a rational argument against, say, Scott Walker and the national conservative machine effort on his behalf in Wisconsin that might actually convince a Republican. Me, I'd be perfectly happy if somebody was willing to stand up in Congress and explain how deeply irrational corn ethanol is on the energy front as well as the food front. I guess I'll get back to Scott Walker instead. |
