The race to make fake meat just got interesting. Two scientists on opposite sides of the world both claim to be on the verge of serving up the first lab-grown hamburger – and saving the planet in the process. The new reality is so close, you can almost taste it.

As mission statements go, it takes some beating. Scrawled on a whiteboard are the words: “We will change how the Earth looks from space!” It surpasses “Don’t be evil” (the motto of Google, just down the road), and in terms of hubris it trumps even that of Facebook (also just round the corner): “Move fast and break things!”

In this anonymous laboratory on a low-rise industrial estate in Menlo Park, 40km south of San Francisco, there is a whiff of revolution in the air. There is a whiff of madness, too, but after a few hours in the company of the man leading this intriguing Silicon Valley startup, one begins to wonder if it is the rest of the world that is insane.

Professor Patrick Brown could easily be taken for a deranged visionary. He is intense, driven and unfazed by critics and rivals. This 57-year-old ultra-lean, sandal-wearing, marathon-running vegan wants to stop the world eating meat. Not through persuasion or coercion, but by offering us carnivores something better for the same price or less.

The fake meat business has been around for decades, of course, but it has never really taken off. That is because the products out there, usually based on some sort of reconstituted soy or fungal gloop, taste as disgusting as they look. They are usually expensive as well.

But the meat-fakers say they are on the verge of a breakthrough, that there is a real possibility that a new era of fake meat – nutritious, cheap and indistinguishable from the real thing, made either of synthesised animal tissue or derived from plant material – may be upon us.

Brown a specialist in the genetics of cancer, is a tenured Stanford University molecular biologist, a member of the National Academy and the founder of a non-profit academic publisher. For two years, he has been working on creating synthesised meat and dairy products. “I have zero interest in making a new food just for vegans,” Brown says. “I am making a food for people who are comfortable eating meat and who want to continue eating meat. I want to reduce the human footprint on this planet by 50%.”

What Brown is talking about is a revolution that will remake our relationship with our planet, and with our fellow animals.

Eating meat is bad for the environment, of that there is no doubt. And the moral arguments against killing animals are compelling. Humans currently slaughter about 1,600 mammals and birds every second for food – that is half a trillion lives a year, plus trillions more fish, crustaceans and molluscs. The total biomass of all the world’s livestock is almost exactly twice that of humanity itself. And while crops that feed people cover just 4% of the Earth’s usable surface (land that is not covered by ice or water, or is bare rock), animal pastureland accounts for a full 30%. Our meat, in other words, weighs twice as much as we do and takes seven times as much land to grow.

Read the rest of this interesting article:–http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jun/22/fake-meat-scientific-breakthroughs-research?utm_source=Sightline+Newsletters&utm_campaign=9d81e99d34-SightlineDaily&utm_medium=email