It looked like a cooking show, but a slightly surreal one; Martha Stewart with a twist of Mary Shelley. In what was billed as a "historic" event, Dutch stem cell researcher Mark Post presented his lab-grown hamburger to the world here on Monday-a beef patty assembled from thousands of small shreds of meat grown from bovine stem cells. British chef Richard McGeown fried the revolutionary burger with generous amounts of butter and oil, and two volunteers then tried it. "Close to meat, not that juicy," was the verdict of one of them, Austrian food trend researcher Hanni Ruetzler. The tightly orchestrated event, organized by PR company Ogilvy, aimed to convince the public and potential funders that lab-grown meat is possible, if far from economically viable. (Producing the 140-gram burger had cost about €250,000.) It represented "a paradigm shift in the way animal protein can be produced," says Nicholas Genovese of the University of Missouri, Columbia, who is studying in vitro meat with support from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
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