Bioengineer Morris Benjaminson is figuring out how to create fish on demand, to develop a device that would grow fresh flesh aboard a space ship to feed astronauts. One day, this hyper-bioengineered food could even reach your dinner table.

This is no fish story. Already, with NASA funding, Benjaminson has taken strips of goldfish and made them grow in his laboratory. Eventually, he sees no reason why you wouldn't want to munch fish sticks or chicken tenders developed without the assistance of any real animals.

"What we see is not just a way of growing something. We see a device that is automatic or semi-automatic," Benjaminson explained in a recent telephone interview. "It is a bioreactor in which solid flesh is produced, rather than wine or something else."

Early results are promising, if not rather gross.

The researchers cut chunks of muscle from oversized goldfish into pan-sized pieces. They worked quickly to keep the flesh alive. "The fish is dead, but the tissue isn't," Benjaminson explains. The chunks were washed in alcohol and stuck in a vat of fetal bovine serum, a nutrient extracted from the blood of unborn calves. After a week, the fish chunks had grown by 14 percent.

Then came the crucial test.

The scientists washed the fattened fish parts, dipped them in olive oil, and flavored them lemon, garlic and pepper. Then they fried the strips and -- here's where the test broke down -- showed them to colleagues. Nobody was biting.

"They said it looked like fish and smelled like fish, but they didn't go as far as tasting it," Benjaminson recently told New Scientist magazine, which first reported on the research.

So, did Benjaminson try it?

"No, I did not."

No apologies necessary. After all, these were goldfish, not trout. And then all that dead calf stuff. Besides, approval from the Food and Drug Administration would be required before anyone could legally consume the product.

Perhaps astronauts, as always, will be the guinea pigs for any future flying fake fish farms. And maybe it'll work. After all, people who go into space already eat ice cream that feels and tastes like Styrofoam.

First, though, there are more tests to conduct. Here's how the process is thought to work:

"Increases in muscle mass usually mean an increase in muscle fibers," Benjaminson said. "That's what we assume is happening here."

But muscles need more than nutrients to gain mass. Exercise typically plays role. Weightlifting or swimming, for example, tears muscles down, then nutrients feed the muscles so that they grow back stronger, bigger. But the goldfish strips were not exactly doing the backstroke.

Benjaminson figures the act of slicing the strips released what he called satellite muscle cells, which were responsible for regeneration of new fibers. In the future, he plans to stimulate the fish slabs electrically and mechanically to compel growth.

Further research is expected to begin soon with chickens, then move to beef, lamb and pork. The scientists are also developing other growth media that don't involve unborn calves. Reconstituted fish powder and a mushroom extract have shown marginal promise.

A paper on the early results has been accepted for publication in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Benjaminson does not see natural fish or farm-raised fish or other animals being replaced. Instead, control over the laboratory process would provide safe food that is produced without the use of antibiotics, whose application in other bioengineered foods draws critics.

Potential customers for bioreactor-based flesh might also include people who don't believe in slaughtering animals, he added. And developing countries and people in remote locations could benefit from a relatively cheap source of protein.

Still, Benjaminson realizes there are public relations hurtles to clear. None of this is really his problem, though. He's just eager to work out the science. And, he said, if the research money is made available, "NASA would have a fairly good system in about five years."

It would take more time, he admits, before a leg of laboratory lamb lands on the average plate.

"That's really a marketing exercise," the scientist said.