In a small laboratory at the Medical University of South Carolina, Dr. Vladimir Mironov has been working for a decade to grow meat. As a developmental biologist and tissue engineer, Dr. Mironov is one of only a few scientists worldwide involved in bioengineering 'cultured' meat.

It's a product he believes could help solve future global food crises resulting from shrinking amounts of land available for growing meat in the old-fashioned way.

"Growth of cultured meat is also under way in the Netherlands", Mironov told Reuters in an interview, "but in the United States, it is science in search of funding and demand."

The new National Institute of Food and Agriculture won't fund it, the National Institutes of Health won't fund it, and the NASA funded it only briefly, Mironov said.

"It's a classic disruptive technology," Mironov said. "Bringing any new technology on the market, on average, costs $1 billion. We don't even have $1 million."

Director of the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Center in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the medical university, Mironov now primarily conducts research on tissue engineering, or growing, of human organs.

"There's an unpleasant factor when people find out meat is grown in a lab. They don't like to associate technology with food," said Nicholas Genovese, a visiting scholar in cancer cell biology.

"But there are a lot of products that we eat today that are considered natural that are actually produced in a similar manner," Genovese said.