Meat will one day be grown in factories

New Scientist reports:

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.

"This could save you having to slaughter animals for food," says project leader Morris Benjaminson....Benjaminson's group cut chunks of muscle five 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....