Dutch Scientist to Create World's First Lab-Grown Burger

Better for your conscience, just as awful for your arteries ...

A Dutch scientist has proclaimed to the world that he will make the world's first "test-tube" hamburger by the end of the year. Dr. Mark Post, a professor at the University of Maastricht, told a conference in Vancouver this weekend that he and his team will make animal skeletal muscle tissue – what we consider meat – out of animal cells that can then be put together into a burger. Post said he received 250,000 euros from an anonymous donor to tackle the project, which he thinks could upend agriculture around the world. Raising livestock for food is one of the least efficient and most wasteful (but also most delicious) forms of food production, but a handful of scientists figure that lab-grown meat could eventually replace cattle, pigs, chickens, and more in our diets. That's all well and good, but we're not sure our foie gras will taste quite the same without a little bit of needless suffering. And that is something that can't be made in a test tube. Yet.