In a small liboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, Dr. Vladimir Mironov has been working for a decade to grow meat. A developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov, is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering 'cultured' meat.
It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat the old-fashioned way.
“Growth of cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands”, Mironov told Reuters in an interview, “but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand.”
The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture won't fund it, the National Institutes of Health won't fund it, and the NASA funded it only briefly, Mironov said.
"It's classic disruptive technology," Mironov said. "Bringing any new technology on the market, on average, costs $1 billion. We don't even have $1 million."
Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs.
"There's an unpleasant factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don't like to associate technology with food," said Nicholas Genovese, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology.
"But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are produced in a similar manner," Genovese said.
30. What does Dr. Mironov think of bioengineering cultured meat?
31. What does Dr. Mironov say about the funding for their research?
32. What does Nicholas Genovese say about a lot of products we eat today?
【点评】
这是路透社2011年初的一篇报道，题目为“South Carolina scientist works to grow meat in lab”。本文为食品科技类题材。大意为生物工程技术应用在实验室生产肉，可改变传统肉类获得方式，解决将来的食物危机，不过还需资金支持，同时人们还难以完全接受这种方式。