August 5, 2013, 9:31 AM
- David Parry/PA
- A hamburger made from animal tissue grown in the lab by Prof. Mark Post and team.
Who would spend thousands of dollars on a burger? Google GOOG founder Sergey Brin, one of the world’s richest people, that’s who.
To be fair, the burger is the first to be made from artificial beef, grown from a stem-cell culture in a lab. The patty, developed by Maastricht University professor Mark Post, got its first airing — and eating — in London on Monday. In a video, Brin explained why he’d invested in the 250,000-euro ($330,000) project, which hopes to eventually relieve the strain on the environment of the growing demand for meat.
The 39-year-old Google co-founder has a history of investing into science-fiction-sounding projects. Brin has put money into Space Adventures, which sells trips to the moon for $100 million, and, along with fellow Google founder Larry Page, film director James Cameron and others, is behind the Planetary Resources project to develop a way to mine asteroids for metals.
“If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough,” Brin said in the Department of Expansion video.
The first public tasting of Prof. Post’s burger happened in front of a small invited audience on Monday afternoon U.K. time, but was live-streamed on the internet. Two people — food scientist Hanni Ruetzler and author Josh Schonwald — got to sink their teeth into the precious patty.
The verdict? “I thought the inside would be softer,” said Ruetzler, complaining that it was too hot to eat. (Too hot temperature-wise, that is: she also suggested serving it with salt and pepper next time.) But she did say it was “close to meat” and had taste — even if it wasn’t juicy.
Schonwald walked the same semi-approving line. “It’s got texture,” he said. No points for flavor, though.
Creating the animal tissue from scratch is a painstaking process. It takes around 3,000 muscle strips — each the size of a grain of rice and grown separately — to create the final patty. Despite this, Post said at the lunch/launch that he believes this can eventually be mass-scaled, following what medical researchers have been able to do with stem cells. Brin agrees.
“It’s really just proof-of-concept right now,” the Google chief says in the video. “We’re trying to create the first cultured beef hamburger. From there I’m optimistic that we can really scale by leaps and bounds.”
Which naturally leads into another pressing question, put by a journalist from The Sun, according to this Tweet:
No comments:
Post a Comment