CENTRE FOR EXCELLENCE IN CELLULAR AGRICULTURE

About: 

• GFI India is looking for ₹50 crore-worth of funding to set up a lab at ICT by the end of 2019, and also build a greenfield facility for the research centre in the next two years. By early 2020, it expects to begin offering taste tests of meat grown in the lab from samples of animal tissue. 
  
  
• Timeline: 
  • Churchill’s prediction: “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” wrote Churchill, in his 1931 essay Fifty Years Hence. 
    
    
  • The first government-funded research on this kind of lab-grown meat began in the Netherlands in 2005, and culminated in 2013, when the first cell-cultured hamburger was cooked and tasted live in London. 
    
    
  • Mark Post, the Dutch pharmacologist behind the development of that burger, went on to co-found a company named Mosa Meat to develop commercial production methods to bring cell-based meat to the dining table at more affordable prices. 
    
    
  
  
  

Analysis: 

• Benefits: 
  • The meat is slaughter-free and aims to bypass the problems of modern factory-farming, whether the objections of cruelty to animals, infections of salmonella and e coli, or meat injected with multiple doses of antibiotics. 
    
    
  • Environmentally, it’s a far more efficient production process when it comes to land use and water use. 
    
    
  • The research centre can create products not only for the ₹20,000-crore Indian meat sector, but also the trillion-dollar international market. 
    
    
  
  
  
• Challenges: 
  • The science is still a work in progress, especially the effort to find a suitable serum and a cell culture medium which are stable, standardised and not dependent on live animal products. 
    
    
  • There needs to be a regulatory framework in place to test, regulate and label such foods. Initial discussions have been held with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India.