Peta offers $1M prize for 'in vitro meat'

Posted by ryan at 02:10 PM in animals . | 2 Comments

I'm hesitant to post anything positive about PETA, for the most part I find them to be little more than a cult that is often times nothing short of deplorable.

That being said, I like the idea of an X-Prize style campaign to develop in vitro meat.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to pay a million dollars for fake meat — even if it has caused a “near civil war” within the organization.

The organization said it would announce plans on Monday for a $1 million prize to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

The idea of getting the next Chicken McNugget out of a test tube is not new. For several years, scientists have worked to develop technologies to grow tissue cultures that could be consumed like meat without the expense of land or feed and the disease potential of real meat. An international symposium on the topic was held this month in Norway. The tissue, once grown, could be shaped and given texture with the kinds of additives and structural agents that are now used to give products like soy burgers a more meaty texture.