The black and white squiggles on the grainy screen would mean little to the average eye. But to Vinod Verma, they were a source of endless ...
The black and white squiggles on the grainy screen would mean little to the average eye. But to Vinod Verma, they were a source of endless exhilaration.
With childlike enthusiasm, the biologist at the Sanjay Gandhi Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow pointed to the screen attached to his microscope and pronounced hopeful news. Within 10-15 days, the stem cells – those squiggles on the screen – may become muscle cells of a goat, and sometime later, a chunk of edible mutton.
“Within one year, we will be able to commercialise it,” Verma said with unbridled confidence.
There are several obstacles in his path, though. For one, the cells need the right resources, known as culture medium, to grow (“they aren’t immortal”). For another, they need the right scaffolding, or the 3D structure that holds them up. “Only then can we get the cells going and get that tissue,” he conceded.
After that will come the biggest obstacle of all: getting the right flavour and texture. For the cultured mutton to sell, it has to taste like, well, mutton. But what makes mutton mutton or chicken chicken?
It’s a question that several researchers in India are wrestling with, including Nalam Madhusudhana Rao of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in...
