COULD we make meat on demand without slaughtering fish or beasts? 快猫短视频s trying to create alternative food sources for astronauts believe so.
In a bid to make a simple source of nutritious food for long-distance space travellers, scientists at Touro College in New York have managed to make slices of fish grow bigger. Their achievement holds out the prospect of growing meat in industrial quantities from the muscle cell lines of various animals or fish.
鈥淭his could save you having to slaughter animals for food,鈥� says project leader Morris Benjaminson, a bioengineer and veteran of a number of NASA projects on recycling waste onboard spacecraft. But Benjaminson鈥檚 initial aim is more modest. He鈥檚 working on more varied diets for astronauts, who would quickly tire of their bland freeze-dried or squeezy tubes of food on long missions to Mars, for example.
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To make space meals more appetising, scientists have been looking at ways of producing fresh food for astronauts in flight. Last year German researchers designed an artificial ecosystem to provide a continuous supply of fresh fish in a spacecraft (快猫短视频, 1 December 2001, p 20).
But breeding live animals for food has drawbacks鈥攖hey produce excrement, and killing them generates a lot of waste too. So NASA is paying for Benjaminson to go one step further and grow just the animals鈥� edible muscle.
Initial experiments to see if the idea could work were rather grisly. Benjaminson鈥檚 group cut chunks of muscle 5 to 10 centimetres long from large goldfish. After washing the chunks in alcohol, they immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich liquid extracted from the blood of unborn calves, which biologists usually use for growing cells in the lab.
After a week in the vat, the fish chunks had grown by 14 per cent, Benjaminson and his team found. To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, they washed it and gave it a quick dip in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried it and showed it to colleagues from other departments.
鈥淲e wanted to make sure it鈥檇 pass for something you could buy in the supermarket,鈥� he says. The results look promising, on the surface at least. 鈥淭hey said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn鈥檛 go as far as tasting it,鈥� says Benjaminson. They weren鈥檛 allowed to in any case鈥擝enjamison will first have to get approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.
Benjaminson concedes that people might be reluctant to eat food grown in fetal bovine serum鈥攏ot least because of worries about the transmission of vCJD through any rogue prion proteins it may contain. He tried growing chunks of goldfish muscle in liquid mushroom extract instead, but although the tissue survived for a week, it didn鈥檛 grow. He鈥檚 hoping to find a friendlier substitute for bovine serum before trying the technique on chicken, beef and lamb.
The idea has received a cautious welcome. 鈥淔ish mass grown in a nutrient broth sounds as unappealing as some of the other food astronauts take up with them, but these things have got to be explored,鈥� says Colin Pillinger, head of the Planetary Space Sciences Research Institute at the Open University in Milton Keynes. 鈥淚 think it鈥檇 be more appropriate when you鈥檝e got a base set up on a planet鈥攖he sort of equipment you need for biotechnology is fragile. Who knows what would happen to it during launch and the flight,鈥� he says.