This page is a timeline of major events in the history of cellular agriculture. Cellular agriculture refers to the development of agricultural products - especially animal products - from cell cultures rather than the bodies of living organisms. This includes in vitro or cultured meat, as well as cultured dairy, eggs, leather, gelatin, and silk. In recent years a number of cellular animal agriculture companies and non-profits have emerged due to technological advances and increasing concern over the animal welfare and rights, environmental, and public health problems associated with conventional animal agriculture.[1]
| Year | Event | |
|---|---|---|
| 1912 | French biologist Alexis Carrel keeps a piece of chick heart muscle alive in a Petri dish, demonstrating the possibility of keeping muscle tissue alive outside of the body.[2] | |
| 1930 | Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead predicts that "It will no longer be necessary to go to the extravagant length of rearing a bullock in order to eat its steak. From one 'parent' steak of choice tenderness it will be possible to grow as large and as juicy a steak as can be desired."[3] | |
| 1932 | Winston Churchill writes "Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium." | |
| Early 1950s | Willem van Eelen recognizes the possibility of generating meat from tissue culture. | |
| 1971 | Russell Ross achieves the in vitro cultivation of muscular fibers.[4] | |
| 1995 | The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves the use of commercial in-vitro meat production.[5] | |
| 1999 | Willem van Eelen secures the first patent for cultured meat. | |
| 2001 | NASA begins in vitro meat experiments, producing cultured turkey meat.[6] [7] | |
| 2002 | Researchers culture muscle tissue of the common goldfish in Petri dishes. The meat was judged by a test-panel to be acceptable as food. | |
| 2003 | Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of the Tissue Culture and Art Project and Harvard Medical School produce an edible steak from frog stem cells.[8] | |
| 2004 | Jason Matheny founds New Harvest, the first non-profit to work for the development of cultured meat. | |
| 2005 | Dutch government agency SenterNovem begins funding cultured meat research.[9] | |
| 2005 | The first peer-reviewed journal article on lab-grown meat appears in Tissue Engineering.[10] | |
| 2008 | The In Vitro Meat Consortium holds the first international conference on the production of in vitro meat.[11] | |
| 2008 | People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offers a $1 million prize to the first group to make a commercially viable lab-grown chicken by 2012. | |
| 2011 | The company Modern Meadow, aimed at producing cultured leather and meat, is founded.[12] | |
| 2013 | The first cultured hamburger, developed by Dutch researcher Mark Post's lab, is taste-tested by Hanni Rützler.[13] | |
| 2014 | Muufri and The EVERY Company, companies aimed at producing cultured dairy and eggs, respectively, are founded with the assistance of New Harvest.[14] [15] | |
| 2014 | Real Vegan Cheese, a startup aimed at creating cultured cheese, is founded.[16] | |
| 2014 | Modern Meadow presents "steak chips", discs of lab-grown meat that could be produced at relatively low cost. | |
| 2015 | The Modern Agriculture Foundation, which focuses on developing cultured chicken meat (as chickens make up the large majority of land animals killed for food[17]), is founded in Israel.[18] | |
| 2015 | According to Mark Post's lab, the cost of producing a cultured hamburger patty drops from $325,000 in 2013 to less than $12.[19] | |
| 2016 | New Crop Capital, a private venture capital fund investing in alternatives to animal agriculture - including cellular agriculture - is founded. Its $25 million portfolio includes cultured meat company Memphis Meats and cultured collagen company Gelzen, along with Lighter, a software platform designed to facilitate plant-based eating, a plant-based meal delivery service called Purple Carrot, a dairy alternative Lyrical Foods, the New Zealand plant-based meat company Sunfed, and alternative cheese company Miyoko’s Kitchen.[20] | |
| 2016 | The Good Food Institute, an organization devoted to promoting alternatives to animal food products - including cellular agriculture - is founded.[21] | |
| 2016 | Memphis Meats announces the creation of the first cultured meatball.[22] | |
| 2016 | New Harvest hosted New Harvest 2016: Experience Cellular Agriculture, the first-ever global cellular agriculture conference.[23] | |
| 2018 | Paul Shapiro's book Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, which chronicles the entrepreneurs, scientists and investors seeking to create the world's first slaughter-free meat.[24] The book was placed on The Washington Post's bestseller list.[25] | |
| 2019 | Perfect Day (formerly Muufri) sells 1000 3-pint bundles of ice cream made with non-animal whey protein.[26] | |
| 2020 | Memphis Meats received a US$161 million investment in its Series B, which is more than everything that had been invested in the industry so far which was US$155 million.[27] | |
| 2021 | Tufts University is awarded US$10 million by the USDA to establish the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture.[28] |