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As I pondered over how to get started with this article, I recalled a news story I saw on TV a few years ago about a steer on its way to the slaughter-house that decided it didn't want to go there, and escaping captivity made a mad dash for freedom. After viewing the story, I wondered as I'm sure many people did, if the poor animal had developed some sense of what was about to happen to it.

We humans are the only species of life on this small blue planet that cultivates and harvests food in an artificial way, plants, animals, and even bacteria and fungi. Without our artificial food supplies our numbers would be far fewer. When you consider our farming practices, particularly those pertaining to livestock, there is a degree of barbarous conduct associated with it. We seldom think or want to think of the food we are eating in terms of its status as that of a being, indeed, the animals dignity of existence. And we don't think about it, we just go to the super market and pick up a nicely packaged presumably sterile portion of beef, port chicken or turkey, giving no thought to the animal that was sacrificed to provide it. If we had to kill and quarter the poor creature ourselves, it's consumption might be less appetizing to us.

Today we can consider an alternative. The science of molecular biology and genetics has given us the opportunity to borrow a few stem cells from an animal, and clone them to produce protein rich, edible, tissue; exactly the same as we currently obtain from butchered animals. In mass production a ready supply of fresh meat could become available and perhaps even more affordable than the products we now consume from the slaughter house. But would you be willing to eat a cultured versus butchered form of your favorite meat products? Why not? It's the exact same stuff, produced with the exact same process of biosynthesis; with the caveat that we don't have to kill a living being to get it. But there may be some other less obvious reasons for consuming meat products cultured from stem cells.

We wouldn't have to worry about diseases like mad cow, bacteria like E. Coli and salmonella, fecal contamination, and other problems endemic to current meat production processes. Perhaps with a little bioengineering at the stem cell level, more nutritious meat products could be created, lower in cholesterol and the steroids inherent in the current meat supply. Maybe we could splice a few genes from a codfish into beef, chicken, or pork stem cells, producing a

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