The test tube hamburger: the implications are earth shattering

Louise Brown, the first so-called test-tube baby, was born in the United Kingdom in 1978. Today, thirty-five years later, in-vitro fertilization is something so normal, so day-to-day, that it no longer attracts attention: we all know of a couple that have undergone the treatment, and many readers may well have had the therapy themselves. Artificial conception is now one of the facts of life.

The widespread acceptance of new technologies by society faces several barriers: aside from the development and perfection of the technology in itself, there are challenges such as cost, as well as cultural approval, which require time, but which eventually allow us to adapt to new ways of doing things. For example, in 20 or 30 years, much of humanity will see laboratory-cultivated meat as perfectly normal.

The processes involved in producing meat are one of those open secrets that everybody knows about, but instead prefers not to discuss. That said, British chef Jamie Oliver recently managed to persuade fast food chain McDonalds to stop using amonia in its hamburgers, a product that is harmful to health, but that allow it to process low-quality meat. This is just one of the barbaric practices of the meat industry, one that uses more than 70 percent of all antibiotics to treat its animals, generating resistant bacteria while threatening public health, and at the same time using brutal and cruel methods to rear animals as part of a process that is colossally wasteful, particularly in terms of demographics. But we like meat, and largely prefer to ignore the way that it makes its way on to our plates.

The solution is obviously to move from “growing animals”—a period in our history that has witnessed the output of poor quality food, along with keeping animals in poor conditions—to the production of synthetic meat, i.e. that was previously was not part of an animal with a central nervous system. The synthetic meat industry has been around for a few years now (it was listed among the best inventions of 2009 by Time magazine, and has attracted the attention of Google’s Sergey Brin.

Yesterday saw the unveiling of the first test tube hamburger, produced by taking muscle cells from a cow and cultivating them via stem-cell techniques without losing their structural qualities, an event of earth shattering implications, and opening the door to hugely superior production methods.

After passing the edibility test , and backed by public opinion polls , we can expect to see in the not-too-distant future—once the necessary industrial scales of economy have been established to make it affordable—two products on our supermarket shelves: one from an animal, accompanied by labels referring to animal cruelty and the damage caused to the environment by its production, but that will continue to attract some purchasers; and another, tasting the same, of similar quality and price, but that has been produced in a laboratory.

We’re not talking science fiction here; these are production processes that have been proved to work, are safe, and that simply need to be ramped up. We now have a choice: we can be no-kill carnivores, not so much on the basis of technology, but on that of efficiency and ethics.

This is one of those technologies the impact of which will go way beyond our initial analyses, even if the connotations and social acceptance of which will need to be worked on. For the moment, “test-tube hamburger” still seems little more than a good headline, but as we will see, the implications will be lasting and far-reaching, and affect the entire planet.