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Delicious roast Turkey is the main dish on Thanksgiving Day. This past Thanksgiving, Paul Mozzczak delivered a message unlike any other: thanking people for finally embracing his great idea of growing Turkey in a 5,000-gallon jar.

Mozzczak is a professor of poultry science at North Carolina State University who specializes in growing poultry muscle cells in long-necked jars in the lab. His research concept of "cellular agricultural technology" has been incorporated into the university's frontier program. According to the concept, by 2030, animal protein on the table will be supplied through bioreactor production, and animal farming may be completely replaced in the future.

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he zack's concept is also called "in vitro meat quality training". Mark Post, a Dutch scientist who appeared on a British TV show in 2013, made and ate the first "cultured meat burger" using meat grown from biotechnology, the MIT Technology Review magazine reported recently. The cost of the experiment behind it was as high as $300,000, but thanks to the sponsorship of Google founder Sergey Brin, the "in vitro meat culture" technology was spread to millions of homes in an instant.

> Environmentalists and animal activists, as well as some investors, began to take notice and promote the technology. They argue that it offers advantages over farming and culling. British agroecologist Hannah Tomisto has found that cultured beef can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from raising cattle by as much as 90 percent and reduce land use by 99 percent. More than half of vegetarians also said they would be willing to eat meat produced in a lab.

Mozzczak believes that the price of cultured meat will gradually come down to a level that will compete with conventional meat. For one thing, cultured meat only produces meat that can be eaten, while conventional farming requires a lot of waste to feed the bones, digestive tract and other parts that have no food value. "In a few years' time in the supermarket, cultured meat will probably cost as much, or at least no more, than conventional meat," Mozzczak said.

A few cells can replace a chicken farm

Taking chicken breast meat the size of a rubber block, Mozzczak isolated a type of stem cell called "satellite cell" from it, which divides several times to form muscle fibers. Placed in a petri dish at the right temperature and provided with glucose and amino acids, each satellite cell could divide 75 times in three months, producing muscle fibers that could be cooked into massive chicken McNuggets. This means that a few cells could replace a conventional chicken farm.

This summer, Mr. Mozczak was invited to a conference held by the group NewHarvest, where many people showed off lab-grown beef, gelatin, egg whites and milk.

< p> While there are strong voices, commercialisation of lab-grown meat will have to wait. At the New Harvest conference, Holz Smith of Tyson Foods asked the assembled experts: "Whose research can be immediately put into mass production?" No one raised their hand.

Mozzczak's team can only grow a thin layer of cells on the inside of plastic bottles. If they are too thick, the nutrients won't reach them. It took 11,340 plastic bottles and $34,000 to grow a Turkey breast this way; The Memphis Meat Plant costs $18,000 a pound to grow ground beef from cow stem cells. And Modern Ranch announced that it was abandoning its much-hyped plans for a laboratory beef fillet to work on synthesizing higher-value leather.

After several hot years with no funding for his research, Mozzczak says he received $118,800 from New Harvest earlier this year to provide "seed" cells to other researchers. He recently struck a deal with David Kaplan, a biopharmaceutical engineer at Tufts University, to provide "seed" cells to help Caplan grow muscle cells in three dimensions, overcoming the technical difficulties of in vitro meat culture.

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