The promise of in vitro meat has been speculated about for decades - almost a hundred years. In Science Left Behind, I quote Winston Churchill from 1932 talking about his science-based vision of future meat production but I only used him because he is a well-known name. Scientists were talking about growing meat in a lab long before that and still do.
There are good reasons to do so - reasons that make everyone happy. Animal activists, for example, want fewer delicious animals killed. Problem solved. Environmental activists want fewer emissions and growing food contributes a lot to emissions. Problem solved there also.
Well, first an intermission. Forget that nonsense about how much more emissions a meat eater who walks to the store causes than people who drive a car, young science bloggers are going to rehash old statistics (double penalty for taking anything in Seed magazine as a real source) like 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef' because it shows up at the top of Google after benefiting from a 25 year vegetarian marketing campaign (an alarming number of scientists in the current generation think "Silent Spring" had science in it also - people need to take classes in reason and skepticism, along with their majors) - while that metric was entirely invented there is real value in thinking about replacing big animals farms with in vitro meat.
But there is also a pretty substantial technical hurdle to overcome. One of the things I dig most about science is the diversity people have - even if it takes a while to find it. While the human embryonic stem cell hype machine was in full force, I wondered why so few contrarians spoke up about how overblown the controversy (and claims) were (and I was right - induced pluripotent stem cells will win a Nobel before hESC does) - it turns out all it took for biologists to decry the promise of scaling in biology was for a company to claim they could grow meat in a Petri dish, figuratively speaking.
