Re: Is it possible though animal tissue culturing to grow edible meat in a lab?

Hiya Casey!

For one, it is great for you to be exposed to tissue culturing so early in 
your education - it is great experience if you want a research job in 
the "real world!"
 
As for growing slabs of meat and the like, this is a good question. ;)
 
Tissue culture, as I am sure you have seen, is done on a relatively small 
scale.  For example, I may grow ten million cells, and when I condense 
them down to a "solid" form - even being about the solidity of say, 
pudding, I may have a clump the size of a split pea!  To keep these cells 
happy and healthy, I may use about 20-30 milliliters of a balanced medium 
solution so that they can grow happily, so this is a LOT of space for a 
relatively tiny mass of cells.  Also, the cells I work with 
are "transformed" cells (which means they have either been purposely made 
immortal or they are a cancer cell-line, which are immortal by 
definition), which means that they require *less* growth space than a 
normal cell-line.  Most cancer cells lose a cell property called "contact 
inhibition", so they will even use extra space and grow in little piles on 
top of eachother.

(Contact inhibition is when cells touch eachother or the edge of a 
container/medium solution they stop dividing, and will then only exist in 
a monolayer - one layer thick - and not on top of eachother.)
 
Muscle, nerve, and cardiovascular tissue can be grown in culture in 
monolayers, but at the moment it is a very expensive, time consuming, and 
tedious process.  I am not too keen unfortunately on just how *much* mass-
wise they can grow at a time, but I am sure it takes months and months to 
grow an acceptable and useful amount for medicinal purposes - far longer 
than say, the gestation period of a calf which would produce far more 
tissue than they are creating.
 
The livestock issue can also stem from "cruelty to animals" issues and the 
like, as well as the difficulties these days of upkeeping farms to the 
production levels necessary for the population, and it is good to be 
thinking about this sort of thing.
 
But I'll tell you that *today*, it is far cheaper, easier, and quicker to 
let two cows get together and make another cow than it would be to try to 
create a T-bone steak in the lab.  
 
Though with the way science has been growing and advancing so quickly, you 
may very well prove me wrong in ten years when you get your PhD.  ;)
 
Great thinking and good luck in your endeavors,
 
    - Patricia O.