Scientists have created mammoth meat in the lab as a meatball, now no one dares to eat it because of the fear of the ancient protein being deadly.
As the days of breathing go, this meatball is only a few thousand years past its prime. That is, it contains the “resurrected” food of the woolly mammoth, an animal that became extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The prehistoric meatball was created by an Australian cultured meat company that ultimately wants to mix and match cells from different species not to create new types of food.
scientists took the DNA sequence of a mammoth muscle protein and filled in the gaps with the code of an elephant, the species’ closest living relative. The sequence was then placed in the myoblast cells of the egg, which replicated to produce twenty billion cells, which in turn were used to grow mammoth meat.
However, despite what they hope to create food that is “really tasty”, experts are too afraid to eat it in case the ancients prove to be sometimes deadly. “We haven’t seen this protein in thousands of years,” said Professor Ernst Wolvetang, who made the meatball with Vow.
“If we were to do it again, we could definitely do it in a way that would be more acceptable to the regulators,” he said.
Professor Wolvetang, from the Australian Bioengineering Institute at the University of Queensland, told Guardian the process was “easy and quick” and completed in “two weeks”. He added that the initial goal was to make dodo meat. But since the DNA sequences required for this do not currently exist, this could not be done.
The initial idea to create the mammoth food came from Bas Korsten of the creative agency Wunderman Thompson. Voto said he ended up choosing this bait “because (the mammoth) is a symbol of the loss of diversity and a symbol of climate change.” The animal is believed to have become extinct due to hunting and global warming after the last Ice Age.
The company’s overall goal is to demonstrate the possibility of cell cultured meat as an alternative to animal slaughter and to global warming associated with the production of large livestock.
Farm food uses much less land and water than livestock, while producing no methane emissions. scientists say that the overall environmental impact of producing cultured meats will be substantially lower than conventionally produced meats, although a direct comparison is not possible because cultured products are not yet produced on an industrial scale.
One study claimed that cultured meat uses about 7 to 45 percent less energy than conventionally produced meat. Greenhouse gas emissions were found to be 78 to 96 percent lower, while land use fell by 99 percent and water use by 82 to 96 percent.
