Morris Benjaminson
Scientist who proved meat could be grown in a laboratory
MORRIS BENJAMINSON, who has died aged 86, led a scientific team which proved that it was possible to grow meat in the laboratory, helping to found a new discipline of cellular agriculture, which seeks to design new ways of producing products such as milk and meat from cells and microorganisms.
In 2002 Benjaminson, a biology professor at Touro College in New York, received a small grant from Nasa, which was looking for ways of making space meals more appetising. The previous year German researchers had designed an artificial ecosystem to provide a continuous supply of fresh fish in a spacecraft.
But breeding live animals has obvious drawbacks as a source of food in space – they produce excrement, and killing them generates waste. When Nasa put out a call for scientists to help develop food sources for astronauts, the agency was mainly thinking of vegetables. Benjaminson, however, had other ideas. “Logically,” he said, “it occurred to me that if you can grow plants in space, then why can’t you do it with meat?”
In a somewhat grisly experiment, Benjaminson and his colleagues cut chunks of muscle from live goldfish and steeped them in vats of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient-rich cocktail made from the blood of unborn calves. After about a week, the chunks had grown in size by 14 per cent and resembled small fish fillets.
To get some idea whether the new muscle tissue would make acceptable food, he and his colleagues dipped it in olive oil flavoured with lemon, garlic and pepper, fried it, then convened a panel of female employees (chosen for their supposedly superior sense of smell) as “tasters”.
“We wanted to make sure it’d pass for something you could buy in the supermarket,” Benjaminson recalled. The results were promising: “They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish.” They were not allowed to taste it, however, because of US laws banning consumption of experimental products.
Nasa decided there were easier and cheaper ways to feed astronauts than in-vitro meat, and stopped funding the research. But other scientists took up the challenge, spurred on by concerns over the world’s growing population and the environmental impact of conventional livestock farming, which accounts for about a fifth of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The first cultured beefburger, created by scientists at Maastricht University, was eaten at a press demonstration in London in 2013. Benjaminson himself went on to research growing meat from cow muscle.
Benjaminson liked to stress the animal welfare and health benefits of laboratory meat: “This could save you having to slaughter animals for food … And [it] would definitely be much safer than any of the meat that’s produced these days which has antibiotics added to the cattle feed … Lots of people think this idea is ridiculous. And maybe they’re right for now – but not forever.”
An only child, Morris Aaron Benjaminson was born on August 6 1930 in the Bronx, New York. After a degree in Biology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, he served for two years as a volunteer in the US Army during the Korean War.
Returning to the US, he took advanced degrees in Biology, followed by a PHD at New York University. His career as an academic and research scientist culminated in his appointment as professor and chairman of the department of Applied Bioscience at Touro College.
He was a veteran of a number of Nasa projects on recycling waste on-board spacecraft, winning three Nasa awards. He held numerous patents and published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers for professional journals.
His marriage to Barbara Borodin was dissolved, but they remained close friends. She survives him with their son and daughter.
Morris Benjaminson, born August 6 1930, died May 22 2017