Will it ever be possible to grow meat in tanks? I read about that is some science fiction stories.
It is possible to grow “meat” in tanks. It is just so prohibitively expensive that no one does it except to study the cells and then, since only a few milligrams of cells are needed, the “meat” is grown in plastic dishes or flasks instead of tanks.
Look up “tissue culture” or “tissue culture of myoblasts [muscle cells].”
Actually, we were talking about this the other day in one of my classes. You can buy bacterial protein for use as animal feed right now. They grow up lots of bacteria in tanks and feed them to cattle, for instance. No, this is not responsible for either foot and mouth disease or mad cow disease.
So that’s kind of what you’re talking about. But as far as growing genuine T-bone steaks? It might be possible one day with enough work, but why go to the trouble when cows do it so much more easily?
Because it might be a great way to cut down on the amount of pollution caused by the meat industry and perhaps cut some cost. Although I don’t imagine that anything like this will be done anytime soon.
Marc
“Tank meat”? Sounds like something you have to clean up after a particularly nasty aquarium accident.
Agreed, with some reservations. First, keep in mind that even tank meat would require some sort of nutrients, which would have to come from somewhere. On the one hand, you’d expect that immersing the meat in nutrients would lead to more efficent absorption thereof, so less nutrition would be required than for cow meat. On the other hand, the presumable lack of a circulatory system (unless you’re planning on growing a heart as well - and a brain) could slow down absorption, thus raising the nutrient requirements.
Second, as for cost, I would seriously doubt that tank meat would be cheaper than cow meat for a long long time. Development of the technology would require a whole lot of money and time.
So yeah, I think it could be done, and I think the end product could be valuable, but the economic reality of it is not favorable for the foreseeable future.
Of course, that’s all just IMHO.
“Because it might be a great way to cut down on the amount of pollution caused by the meat industry and perhaps cut some cost.”
Not likely. Even though a nice, shiny, clean building in an industrial park filled with stainless steel tanks and pipes looks very clean compared with a feed lot (and smells better) you have to take into account the mines, smelters, forges, trucks, chemical plants, etc. that produced the input to construct and maintain the “meat factory.” I suspect that, on balance, a farm in which cattle waste is recycled as fertilizer for pastures and crops would be more efficient and hence produce less pollution than a “meat” factory.
In much of Europe, where the EC’s agricultural policies sustain uneconomical farms, the countryside is filled with quaint farmhouses and barns with quaint farmers caring for tiny herds of cattle on a few acres of pasture and garden. The countryside is beautiful and “pollution” seems to be a problem only on the few days a year when the farmers clean out their barns and spread the manure on their fields. It’s not as efficient as the way they do it in Garden City, Kansas, but it looks (and smells) a whole lot better.
As a vegetarian of over five years who misses meat almost every day, I would be all for tank meat if it was enviro friendly. In fact I proclaimed when I first switched that I would not eat meat again until it was grown in tubs.
good one evilbeth 
I had this vision of cows with helmets on driving around in Sherman tanks. Are you sure McDonald’s isn’t doing this already somewhere out in the desert?
Where’s the impetus, financial or moral, for growing meat in vats for human consumption? We’ll stick to feed lots and home on the range. Now growing human organs for future transplants, sure. With advancement in cloning techniques and better understanding of the rejection process, specialized organ growth factories could be here in 50 years easy, probably 20, maybe 10. The Dick Cheney of 2050 can have a heart on standby, grown from his own tissue.
Where’s the impetus? Disease. Vat-grown meat does not get hoof and mouth disease or mad cow disease, neither does it get any other of the thousand diseases flesh is heir to. If a farmer can be assured that of the thousand pounds of beef he’s growing, a thousand pounds will be saleable anywhere and everywhere, he will be very happy.
A close second is health. Cholesterol can be easily regulated, as can fat, as can anything else.
Of course, the third is social. Vegetarians might feel more comfortable eating meat that is vat-grown, since nothing had to die to make it. Hell, harvesting the initial cells can be done on a living animal, you just need some muscle tissue. I doubt any religions would change their prohibitions, even though vat-grown pork was never on a cloven hoof.
Maybe novelty meats will catch on, like penguin or whale, now that the animals themselves are not harmed and the meat can be produced in arbitrarily large quantities.
I made two threads on this topic, but now I can only find the one in GQ (the other was a poll-type in IMHO).
That’s sort of what popped into my head the first time I read the OP. I’m pretty sure that the more an animal exerts a given muscle, the tougher and stringier the meat from said muscle becomes. Since the tissue that our hypothetical ‘vat meat’ consists of would never be exercised, wouldn’t this be a ready-made, economical way to get extremely high-quality meat? Assuming the technology ever came about, of course.
Sure it does. Any cell culture can become contaminated by bacteria, viruses, fungi… Penicillin was discovered after accidental contamination of a cell culture. It might be easier to keep microbes out of tanks that can be kept in sealed, sterile environments - on the other hand, “tank meat” has no immune system, so if it ever did get contaminated you’d probably have to throw out the whole batch, scrub everything down, and start over.
Depends on why the person is vegetarian in the first place. Moral vegetarianism might allow for “tank meat”. However, there are lots of people like my mother-in-law who just plain don’t like the taste of meat.
True, but maybe someone who’s sick of the beef-pork-chicken runaround would enjoy penguin or ant. Who says we can’t grow arthropod tissue? 
Again true, but the vats would be hermetically sealed in the equivalent of clean rooms. I think meat production would become as sanitary and controlled as antibiotic production is now. As for ‘scrubbing down and starting over’, well, that would be true assuming there are no new ways of fighting disease that come up in the interim between now and the vat-growing future. Perhaps we’ll engineer microbes to eat everything but the cells we want to grow. Perhaps we’ll have ‘silicon microbes’ in the form of nanites to clean things up. A little radiation, or maybe an enzyme that sends a self-destruct code to the engineered microbes, would take care of the policing mechanism.
I’m going to agree with the people who posted that’s it not economical.
You don’t even have to have knowledge of what it would take to to create a cell biology factory. Except the fact that it would cost A LOT OF MONEY!
I work in a cell biology lab in a Agricultural College. The basic premise of research done is to make food cheaper for people and cheaper for producers.
I’ve asked this question before–do you realize how much it would cost to run a sterile food factory growing tissue culture as opposed to a farm? If even feasible?
Feeding farm animals brings to mind the term ‘chicken feed’. Chicken feed in popular culture means cheap.
Even in a cell biology lab, you get contamination of cell cultures. This is on a small, controlled scale. With the Hoof and Foot disease thing going on, do you think cell culture is the answer? God may be able to imagine the regulations, but I’m not. No public or private enterprise is going to undertake this in the forseeable future.
What’s cheaper, do you think, giving farm animals some feed and a place to grow, or setting up a massive, sterile cell culture factory?
In theory, it would be great to harvest meat as a protein source without directly using animals. Ain’t going to happen anytime soon, though.
Derleth–Antibody production? This is done on an extremely small scale when compared to hypothetical tissue culture farming. And, I hate to break it to you, but antibody production involves the injection of antigens~foriegn molecules into the animal that produces the antibodies. I’m sure some vegatarians/vegans would have problems with this.
Yeah said:
I think this is a misunderstanding of the capabilities. As far as I know, we are not able to grow large scale tissues. (If anyone knows otherwise, I would appreciate information.) We can grow thin membranes of cells of various types of tissue, but trying to turn that into a “thick” slice, making whole organs, etc is not possible. Yet. One of the major hindrances is the gravity field that pulls everything, breaking down the structure needed to form organs. That is one advantage of space missions. In fact, one payload that gets flown periodically is a biogrowth chamber for developing cultures in a freefall environment, not subject to the degrading 1 g field and thus able to grow larger. Only problem is the limited flight time. Thus that is one serious potential for the ISS as a payload. Extended biogrowth without gravity. The hope is by figuring out how to do it without gravity, we can then learn ways to ease the effects of gravity and do it here on Earth. But it is still a ways away.
Not only would these practices allow growing meat in tanks (and thus replacing the need to slaughter animals, the apparent driver for many with this idea), it also allows benefits like cloning replacement organs independent of the body to grow them. No need to worry about ethical issues over growing full clones for donor organs and the ways to control brain development or whatever, because you’re not growing the brain, or even the whole unit. Also, you don’t need the time for full body growth, so conceivably can speed up the organ replacement time. Maybe at first a few years, later a few months.
There are probably other things we could get from the practice. Like treating burn patients with new skin for grafts.
This is not within current possibilities, but a healthy estimation would put it within 100 years. A favorable investment of time and money could put some of this within 20 years. 10 is probably a little optimistic without drastic efforts.
Smeghead asked:
For starters, it would free up land for agricultural use or population or parks or parking lots or whatever. Tanked meat wouldn’t require land to graze. Sure, you’d need some sort of nutrient source, so some (most?) of the land might have to go to growing plants to form that nutrient base, but more efficient ways of delivery might be developed.
Second, it eliminates the moral reservation many people have to eating meat. There’s no brain involved, so you don’t have the issue of killing a thinking animal. Also, no arguing over humane conditions during growth - you don’t have to fight PETA over caging your calves in tiny cages, or cutting chicken beaks, etc.
It might be able to control conditions better for limiting disease, etc. I don’t think they would be impervious, but I think it could have less exposure.
Then it could also reduce development time per pound of meat. Instead of taking 2 years to grow a calf to market size, you could get a full batch in 6 months.
There are a lot of reasons why it is worth considering. However, you are correct that as of now it is not possible and would take an immense amount of money to develop and start up.
Meatbeast - we need a meatbeast. Soft, tender, grows quickly. Tasty. We need a meatbeast. (Anyone know the reference? 
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647:
When did I mention antibodies? I said ‘engineered bacteria’ or ‘nanobots’, not antibodies. Unless you can show me where I said antibodies, you argument evaporates.
And as for people still not eating vat-grown meat: I don’t care. My mission is not to spread meat eating. I just thought it would be a happy side-effect to the vat-growing process.
What does Mickey D’s have to do with meat?
I suspect that it would be more practical to use more readily cultured protein sources (like yeast, say) and flavor it. I can’t think of any postprocessing that would yield anything much like a steak out of this, but it might handle the burger market. Regardless, it’s not practical right now.
Irishman, have you been reading Niven again?
Irishman: “One of the major hindrances is the gravity field that pulls everything, breaking down the structure needed to form organs.”
Gravity is not the problem. The problem is perfusion. Real meat is perfused by blood passing through capillaries. The blood provides the cells with a continuous supply of nutrients and a means of waste elimination. Without a continuous supply of nutrients and a means of waste elimination, cells can?t survive. So the only cells that survive in tissue culture are those in thin layers (this is how myoblasts grow), or those that grow individually or in small clumps in suspension [either in constantly rotating roller bottles (this is how lymphocytes grow) or in suspension in agar (this is how tissue culture was first done around the turn of the century)]. These clumps can never be more than a few millimeters in diameter because no cell can be more than a few millimeters from a supply of nutrients and a means of waste elimination. Since a supply of nutrients and a means of waste elimination for any tissue thicker than a few millimeters requires blood vessels, including capillaries, don?t expect anyone to grow either a heart or a porterhouse in a tank until they figure out how to grow blood vessels in tissue culture. People have been trying to grow blood vessels in tissue culture for at least 25 years.
As to why people don?t grow meat in vats and why they aren?t likely to grow meat in vats anytime soon, I can answer that question with some help from Derleth whose post I have excerpted and modified in the two paragraphs below:
Where’s the impetus? Disease. Vat-grown vegetables do not get plum pox virus or phaeoacremonium vine decline, neither do they get any other of the thousand diseases plants are heir to. If a farmer can be assured that of the thousand pounds of peaches he’s growing, a thousand pounds will be saleable anywhere and everywhere, he will be very happy.
A close second is health. Sugar content can be easily regulated, as can fat, as can anything else.
These are advantages of tank-grown meat, just as they are advantages of tank-grown fruits and vegetables, but just as it is a lot easier and cheaper to grow rice in a paddy and grapes on vines, it is a lot easier to grow beef on cattle.
Balance, no it’s not Niven. Ack, I’ve forgotten the author’s name. From a book called “Tuf Voyaging”, a series of short stories about a guy who finds a biological engineering ship that carries the ability to manufacture any biological item out of the vast catalogs of samples from planets all over the galaxy. He decides to make a living as an ecological engineer, going to planets with ecology problems and solving them. He’s a very strange character, but the books pretty funny. One problem he confronts is a planet that is overpopulated, and the population has strong religious pressure to continue population growth, but the political situation does not allow them to expand to other planets. His attempts to solve the problem to the satisfaction of the customers includes giving them the meatbeast.
Sorry for the hijack, but it just fit too well with the topic.
Yeah, I certainly see the point about blood vessels, but I’m taking my information from reading about experiments flown on the Shuttle. I would think the tissue is already programmed to grow blood vessels, but I guess that’s not the case. So that makes two major hindrances.