IVF Sausage in 6 Months!!

This is excellent news for now until the genesis of pure meat "revolutionaries":
This week, researchers met in Gothenburg, Sweden, to plot out a path towards meat without slaughter. The idea of pain-free meat has been bandied about in the past decade, but several false dawns later one fact remains unchanged. "No one has produced in vitro meat yet," says Julie Gold of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, who helped organise the meeting.

The first lab-grown sausage might be just six months away, though, according to Mark Post of Maastricht University in the Netherlands - a major pioneer and champion of the technology. Post has experimented mainly with pig cells and has recently developed a way to grow muscle under lab conditions - by feeding pig stem cells with horse fetal serum. He has produced muscle-like strips, each 2.5 centimetres long and 0.7 centimetres wide.

Researchers know very well that their work can be regarded as unnatural, and consequently struggle to attract funding. A notable exception is $1 million offered by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) for the first commercial synthetic meat. Welin points out that ironically, the livestock in vitro meat could replace is often kept in unnatural conditions and dosed with hormones or antibiotics.

Strengthening the moral case for synthetic meat is its low impact on the environment. Hanna Tuomisto at the University of Oxford estimated the resources needed to grow 1000 kilograms of lab meat by extrapolating from the demands on energy, water and land made by industrial-scale, cellular-based pharmaceuticals operations. She compared those results with the environmental costs of generating 1000 kilograms of beef, lamb, pork and poultry (see diagram). "The impacts are so much lower," she says. For instance, cultured meat will require 99 per cent less land than beef farming.