World's First Test Tube Hamburger Cost Scientists $325,000, Tastes "Reasonably Good"

The world’s first in-vitro hamburger may also be the world’s most expensive burger, having cost its makers $325,000 of anonymously-donated funds, according to The New York Times.

Developed from cells taken from the cow’s neck, researchers from the University of Maastrict announced in early 2012 that they had successfully grown strips of muscle tissue nearly an inch long a part of an effort to design a more efficient way of developing meat than that of rearing animals.

The strips of meat, which, according to UPI, were originally off-white, had to be mixed with blood and artificially-grown fat in order to produce the hamburger that the researchers say they will likely be showing off at an upcoming event in London.

What’s more, a preliminary taste test by lead scientist Mark Post revealed that, as he told the Times, the artificially-developed meat “tastes reasonably good.”

A study released in 2011 by the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology showed that a move from conventionally-farmed meat to cultured meat could mean 7 to 45 percent less energy use, 78 to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, 99 percent lower land use and 82 to 96 percent lower water use when producing the same amount of meat.

However, while Post’s hamburger may symbolize major progress in the field of cultured meat via stem cells, the process is still slow (the hamburger cook-off was originally planned for fall 2012) and expensive, requiring materials such as fetal calf serum.

“This is still an early-stage technology,” Neil Stephens, a social scientist at Cardiff University in Wales who has studied the development of the cultured meat, told the Times. “There’s still a huge number of things they need to know.”

However, Post remains optimistic.

“I see major hurdles, probably better than anybody else,” he said. “But you’ve got to have faith in technological advances, that they will be solved.”