{"id":27072,"date":"2025-04-16T14:54:41","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T13:54:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/?p=27072"},"modified":"2025-04-16T16:09:25","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T15:09:25","slug":"lab-grown-meat-you-may-find-it-icky-but-it-could-drive-forward-medical-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/science-mct\/lab-grown-meat-you-may-find-it-icky-but-it-could-drive-forward-medical-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Lab-grown meat: you may find it icky, but it could drive forward medical research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lab-grown meat causes heated debates. Proponents see benefits for the climate and animal welfare. Opponents worry about a Frankenstein food they regard as risky and unnatural. Whatever your opinion, the technology underpinning cultivated meat is moving fast to create large pieces of muscle tissue, <em>says James Hague, Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and Biophysics at The Open University.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The fact that artificial meat starts as a living tissue means that, as it gets bigger and better, the technologies involved could have a huge impact on medical research.<\/p>\n<p>Lab-grown meat is a sort of engineered tissue. It aims to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/gfi.org\/science\/the-science-of-cultivated-meat\/\">replicate the meat grown in an animal<\/a>\u00a0by dividing a small number of animal cells to create muscle. Meat is mostly made up of muscle cells (myocytes), plus a mix of fat cells (adipocytes) and cells that add structure through materials such as collagen (known as fibroblasts).<\/p>\n<p>The arrangements and proportions of these cells give meat its overall taste and texture. We call the meat grown in a bioreactor \u201ccultivated meat\u201d. Other common terms are \u201ccultured meat\u201d, \u201clab-grown meat\u201d and \u201cartificial meat\u201d, and the production process is also called \u201ccellular agriculture\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/lab-grown-meat-you-may-find-it-icky-but-it-could-drive-forward-medical-research-253565\">Read the full article on The Conversation<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Picture credit &#8211; Thirdman on Pexels<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lab-grown meat causes heated debates. Proponents see benefits for the climate and animal welfare. Opponents worry about a Frankenstein food they regard as risky and unnatural. Whatever your opinion, the technology underpinning cultivated meat is moving fast to create large pieces of muscle tissue, says James Hague, Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":27073,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,14],"tags":[861,1525,1640],"class_list":["post-27072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-environment","category-science-mct","tag-faculty-of-stem","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27072"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27072\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27107,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27072\/revisions\/27107"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}