Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam Here. If we're ever going to abandon this planet and live on Mars or wherever, we're going to have to have hamburgers. And A Russian cosnaught named Alex Grupochka has gotten humanity a little closer to that goal. On a recent trip to the International Space Station, he accomplished making real meat without killing an
animal in space using a three D printer. Of course, there's nothing special about space that makes it more possible to three D print to hamburger. The scientists here on Earth have been doing it since the first Hamburger patty was printed in and the idea for lab grown meat was first patented back in by Villain van Ellen, who spent time in a Japanese prison camp during World War Two.
Conditions for van Ellen and his fellow humans were bad enough, but he was so appalled by how the animals were treated that he made it his life's mission to make slaughtering animals a necessary in our food system. And since NASA and other space programs are looking for a sustainable way to feed astronauts as they pursue plans to send
humans deeper into space than ever before. Three D printing seems like a great way to cut down on the sheer volume of food luggage that these long voyages will require. The hope is that future astronauts will just bring a few plant and animal cells with them in addition to a structure giving material called bioinc, and that they can feed this slurry into a three D printer and walla dinner is served. This is a great idea in everything, but researchers knew that need to tweak the process to
work in the microgravity of space. Yeah of Riisler, a representative from a Left Farms, the Israeli food tech company in charge of the experiment, told space dot Com maturing of bioprinted organs and tissues and zero gravity proceeds much faster than an Earth gravity conditions. The tissue is being printed from all sides simultaneously, like making a snowball. While most other bioprinters cre at it layer by layer on Earth, the cells always fall downward. In zero gravity, they hang
in space and interfere only with each other. Layer by layer printing in gravity requires a support structure. Printing in zero gravity allows tissue to be created only with cell
material without any intermediate support. On September nineteen, a Left Farms gave screw Pochka a bunch of files of biopsied animal cells cow, rabbit, and fish, along with a specialized three D printer that does its job using the magnetic fields and microgravity and instructions to manufacture a few pieces of meat made from some muscle cells and bioinc And
it worked. Screwpoca was able to make a few small pieces of each kind of animal tissue with the setup, which means, thank goodness, we won't have to take cows with us if we want to have cookouts on Mars. Today's episode was written by Jessupine Shields and produced by Tyler Clay. Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. From more in this and lots of other media topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works
dot com and for more podcasts. For my heart Radio is the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.