"It would look," says Dr. Vladimir Mironov, a cell biologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, "like a coffee machine. This is my dream."
Yet here is the thing. The object of Dr. Mironov's dreams may well look like a coffee machine, possibly even down to the satisfyingly hinged compartments and the Krups logo, but it will produce meat. The good doctor, who has made a career in the field of artificial-tissue generation, says that in the future we'll be sprinkling a few "starter cells" into our meat machine before we go to bed and adding a cup or two of "growth medium." The next morning we'll awake to an appetizing, fully formed lump of pork or beef or poultry, ready to be fried up with breakfast, or braised in time for lunch, or hurled raw across the room at an unreasonable spouse whose wrongheaded notions about pretty much everything the hours of darkness have somehow failed to dispel.
