This page is a timeline of major events in the history of cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture refers to the development of agricultural products - especially animal products - from cell cultures rather than the bodies of living organisms. This includes in vitro or cultured meat, as well as cultured dairy, eggs, leather, gelatin, and silk. In recent years a number of cellular animal agriculture companies and non-profits have emerged due to technological advances and increasing concern over the animal welfare and rights, environmental, and public health problems associated with conventional animal agriculture. [1]
Year | Event |
---|---|
1912 | French biologist Alexis Carrel keeps a piece of chick heart muscle alive in a Petri dish, demonstrating the possibility of keeping muscle tissue alive outside of the body. [2] |
1930 | Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead predicts that "It will no longer be necessary to go to the extravagant length of rearing a bullock in order to eat its steak. From one 'parent' steak of choice tenderness it will be possible to grow as large and as juicy a steak as can be desired." [3] |
1932 | Winston Churchill writes "Fifty years hence 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." [3] |
Early 1950s | Willem van Eelen recognizes the possibility of generating meat from tissue culture. [2] |
1971 | Russell Ross achieves the in vitro cultivation of muscular fibers. [4] |
1995 | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the use of commercial in-vitro meat production. [5] |
1999 | Willem van Eelen secures the first patent for cultured meat. [2] |
2001 | NASA begins in vitro meat experiments, producing cultured turkey meat. [6] [7] |
2002 | Researchers culture muscle tissue of the common goldfish in Petri dishes. The meat was judged by a test-panel to be acceptable as food. [2] |
2003 | Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the Tissue Culture and Art Project and Harvard Medical School produce an edible steak from frog stem cells. [8] |
2004 | Jason Matheny founds New Harvest, the first non-profit to work for the development of cultured meat. [3] |
2005 | Dutch government agency SenterNovem begins funding cultured meat research. [9] |
2005 | The first peer-reviewed journal article on lab-grown meat appears in Tissue Engineering. [10] |
2008 | The In Vitro Meat Consortium holds the first international conference on the production of in vitro meat. [11] |
2008 | People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offers a $1 million prize to the first group to make a commercially viable lab-grown chicken by 2012. [5] |
2011 | The company Modern Meadow, aimed at producing cultured leather and meat, is founded. [12] |
2013 | The first cultured hamburger, developed by Dutch researcher Mark Post's lab, is taste-tested by Hanni Rützler. [13] |
2014 | Muufri and The EVERY Company, companies aimed at producing cultured dairy and eggs, respectively, are founded with the assistance of New Harvest. [14] [15] |
2014 | Real Vegan Cheese, a startup aimed at creating cultured cheese, is founded. [16] |
2014 | Modern Meadow presents "steak chips", discs of lab-grown meat that could be produced at relatively low cost. [12] |
2015 | The Modern Agriculture Foundation, which focuses on developing cultured chicken meat (as chickens make up the large majority of land animals killed for food [17]), is founded in Israel. [18] |
2015 | According to Mark Post's lab, the cost of producing a cultured hamburger patty drops from $325,000 in 2013 to less than $12. [19] |
2016 | New Crop Capital, a private venture capital fund investing in alternatives to animal agriculture - including cellular agriculture - is founded. Its $25 million portfolio includes cultured meat company Memphis Meats and cultured collagen company Gelzen, along with Lighter, a software platform designed to facilitate plant-based eating, a plant-based meal delivery service called Purple Carrot, a dairy alternative Lyrical Foods, the New Zealand plant-based meat company Sunfed, and alternative cheese company Miyoko’s Kitchen. [20] |
2016 | The Good Food Institute, an organization devoted to promoting alternatives to animal food products - including cellular agriculture - is founded. [21] |
2016 | Memphis Meats announces the creation of the first cultured meatball. [22] |
2016 | New Harvest hosted New Harvest 2016: Experience Cellular Agriculture, the first-ever global cellular agriculture conference. [23] |
2018 | Paul Shapiro's book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, which chronicles the entrepreneurs, scientists and investors seeking to create the world's first slaughter-free meat. [24] The book was placed on The Washington Post's bestseller list. [25] |
2019 | Perfect Day (formerly Muufri) sells 1000 3-pint bundles of ice cream made with non-animal whey protein. [26] |
2020 | Memphis Meats received a US$161 million investment in its Series B, which is more than everything that had been invested in the industry so far which was US$155 million. [27] |
2021 | Tufts University is awarded US$10 million by the USDA to establish the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture. [28] |
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