[WIRED] LAURA DOMIGAN IS a chronicler of cows. Every biographical detail and pharmacological footnote could be crucial, so the biochemist has a long list of questions for the farmers she works with. Where was the cow raised? What did it eat? What did it look like? Which medicines did it take and why? How old was the cow when it was slaughtered?Domigan knows enough to write a family history about these cows, but she’s more interested in what they leave behind when they die. Shortly after a cow has been slaughtered, one of her colleagues arrives at the abattoir with a Petri dish in hand and removes a tiny slither of muscle tissue from the carcass, bathing it in a salt solution to stop the cells within from bursting open or shrivelling up. The precious nugget is then packed in ice and ferried back to Domigan’s laboratory at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
This is where the bovine biographies come in handy. Domigan’s job is to work out how to turn that collection of cells into hunks of meat grown in stainless steel bioreactors. From a Petri dish to a silo full of steaks, the hope is that one day this process can replace some of the 1.5 billion crop-guzzling, methane-burping cows on the planet today. At a glance, the formula for cultured — or lab-grown — meat is simple. Take some animal cells, feed them on a nutrient-filled broth so they duplicate lots of times, then alter that broth slightly so the cells turn into the constituent parts of meat: muscle, fat, and connective tissue. Perfect this recipe and we could — theoretically — satiate the entire planet’s hunger for burgers and steaks with cells taken from a single cow.
Getting those cells right is a make-or-break issue for the cultured meat industry. Start with the wrong cells and your vat full of would-be-burgers can very quickly turn into a sludge of proto-meat soup. Solve that problem and you’ve still got to work out how to grow those cells at a cost close to conventional meat and then build a whole production process to reliably brew up thousands of tonnes of meat a year. Distilling the essence of an animal into a slice of cells no bigger than a fingertip is a colossal challenge. So far, no one has managed to crack it.
For companies and academics, the only way of figuring all this out is to get up close and personal with a lot of cells. This means getting their hands on cell lines: reliable, well-studied and easy-to-access cells that anyone can experiment on. Cell lines are one of the most basic building tools in scientific research — in the biomedical industry, they’re absolutely everywhere. In the world of cultured meat, however, these much-needed cell lines either don’t exist or are locked up in the labs of a handful of cultured meat companies.
Some scientists fear that the lack of access to cell lines is holding the entire cultured meat industry back. The cellular blueprint for tomorrow’s factory-brewed burgers is out there somewhere — but, without access to cell lines, many of the people trying to make this future a reality are still fumbling around in the half-shadows.