An unusual topic for today. I read The Guardian article Google’s Sergey Brin bankrolled world’s first synthetic beef hamburger. Navigate here to read more. Here is an interesting passage:
Brin’s money was used by a team led by physiologist Dr Mark Post at Maastricht University to grow 20,000 muscle fibres from cow stem cells over the course of three months. These fibres were extracted from individual culture wells and then painstakingly pressed together to form the hamburger that will be eaten in London on Monday. The objective is to create meat that is biologically identical to beef but grown in a lab rather than in a field as part of a cow.
“Cows are very inefficient, they require 100g of vegetable protein to produce only 15g of edible animal protein,” Dr Post told the Guardian before the event. “So we need to feed the cows a lot so that we can feed ourselves. We lose a lot of food that way. [With cultured meat] we can make it more efficient because we have all the variables under control. We don’t need to kill the cow and it doesn’t [produce] any methane.”
We know PLM was first developed for defense, aerospace and automotive manufacturing. That was in the past. Still, the majority of mainstream mature PLM projects are heavily focused towards aerospace, machinery and other “traditional” manufacturing industries. Nevertheless, PLM vendors are expanding their influence on other industries such as process manufacturing, consumer goods, fashion and others. In the past, I remember PLM implementation for food processing industry. Hamburger manufacturing is about to add one more cycle in the beginning – to grow the beef :). Watch the video before – it looks very manufacturing like. It is about design, requirements, production and… efficient manufacturing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vmp_NUVZT8
What is my conclusion? The sci-fi stories are coming true. Are we going to 3D print beef and other food? Think about hamburger manufacturing as a product development process. Today you can see it as an unusual manufacturing perspective. But it is only today. In 10-20 years from now, we will manufacture synthetic beef using assembly lines similar to Toyota or Apple factories. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
