Will it ever be possible to 'grow' meat rather than get it from animals

asks Miss Don:
A. Yes, it may be possible, according to a recent report in New Scientist. Scientists from Touro College in New York have been trying to find an alternative source of food for long-distance space travellers, and think they may have found a way to grow meat from the muscles of animals and fish.

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Q. What's wrong with the food that's already available for astronauts
A. It's bland and monotonous freeze-dried or tubes of food.

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Q. So why wouldn't they just take animals on spaceships
A. There are several drawbacks to breeding live animals for food on a spaceship: they produce excrement which has to dealt with, for example, and killing them creates a lot of waste.

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That's why NASA has asked Morris Benjaminson, a bioengineer and veteran of many NASA projects on recycling waste onboard spacecraft, to find an way of just growing the edible muscle of animals.

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Q. How is it done
A. The scientists cut small chunks of muscle from large goldfish, washed them in alcohol and immersed them in a vat of fetal bovine serum. A week later, the pieces of fish had grown by 14%.

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Q. What's fetal bovine serum
A. It's a nutrient-rich liquid which is taken from the blood of unborn calves.

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Q. Yeuch! Isn't that rather gory
A. It's a substance often used by biologists to grow cells in the lab.

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Q. So, was the fish edible
A. The scientists washed the fish chunks then dipped them in flavoured olive oil and showed them to colleagues, who thought it looked and smelled like fish.

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Q. What did it taste like
A. Nobody has tasted it yet - approval is needed from the US Food and Drug Administration first.

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Q. Will anyone actually want to eat it
A. It might seem rather unappetising once it is taken from the fetal bovine serum, and there are some concerns that vCJD could be transmitted through any rogue prion proteins it may contain.

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Q. Isn't there an option to the fetal bovine serum
A. Benjaminson did try to grow the fish chunks in liquid mushroom extract, but it wasn't as successful. The tissue survived for a week, but didn't grow. He's still trying to find an alternative growing medium.

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By Sheena Miller