Lab-grown meat has been around at least since 2000, when the NSR/Touro Applied BioScience Research Consortium managed to produce edible fish filets from goldfish cells; and in 2001, NASA—in hopes of providing future astronauts with Thanksgiving dinner—began generating lab-grown meat from turkey cells.

Among the latest attempts was a much-publicized, high-tech hamburger, product of vascular physiologist Mark Post’s research lab at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. The five-ounce burger was made from bovine muscle stem cells, which had been bathed in a culture medium containing fetal calf serum to promote growth and differentiation. Once the stem cells had differentiated—that is, transmogrified themselves into genuine muscle cells—they were fed with nutrient solutions and tacked to a sugar scaffold on which