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cells, such as skin and muscle cells, grow. When skin cells
are damaged—for instance, from a cut—the body’s stem cells
rush to the site of the injury, multiply, and turn into skin cells to
heal the wound. Stem cells from a cow similarly can specialize
into muscle cells and theoretically can be kept multiplying by
the billions to form muscle tissue. Today these stem cells are
placed in a growth medium of cow’s blood, where they multiply
until they form small strips of muscle tissue—meat.
The fi rst hamburger made of lab-grown meat was developed
in 2013. It cost $325,000 to produce, and according to tasters it
was not very good. It tasted odd and was dry because of a lack
of fat cells, but it was a start. If scientists can fi gure out a way to

Lab-Grown Fish

In a laboratory in San Diego, California, a company called BlueNalu
has created lab-grown sh, speci cally yellowtail, a tuna-like sh. To
develop the sh, researchers put a live sh under anesthesia and col-
lected a sample of its muscle stem cells, the cells from which all other
cells are grown. The sh was unharmed, but the researchers could
then grow billions of cells from that sample by placing it in broths of
nutrients, where the cells grew into muscle tissue. This “alternative
seafood” is real sh esh, just grown outside of a sh’s body. BlueNalu
CEO Lou Cooperhouse says, “The only difference from a BlueNalu llet
and a regular sh llet is that we don’t have the bones. We also don’t
have the mercury, the parasites, the micro-plastics, nor the bacteria
these things are usually covered in.” The sh is clean meat, tastes like
the real thing, and harms no animals. A great deal more research will
be necessary before such alternative sh comes to market, but Blu-
eNalu hopes to begin selling it in the near future.

Quoted in Brittany Meiling, “Would You Eat Lab-Created Fish? This Startup Is Carving New Path in ‘Alt-
Meat’ Industry,” Phys.org, May 22, 2019. https://phys.org.

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