Test tube meat

[shortly]

My point Pete was not just that people as a whole do not give thought or proper respect to food in general, Regardless of whether you consume a plant animal or fungus a life was given so that you could eat. I honestly believe that all the mass produced cell line meats, Myco "meats" etc etc are not as fantastic as they are touted to be, often they appear to have fantastic sustainable credentials but really they are just huge energy & resource drains that because it is drawn from across the country & the globe the true costs tend to be masked. And i say this as a mycoophile, if i were only to wild pick no problem but start sterilizing & pasteurizing medias, bags, growing & chopping straw etc etc it doesn't stack up.

Not that i'm about to give up growing mushrooms, i just dont delude myself that that it is an entirely benign passtime.

Its a bit like the aquaculture industry, yes its wonderful they can raise lots of lovely fresh protein under controlled conditions in ponds or cages taking pressure off wild stocks? but ask them where the ingredients for the feed comes from? almost all (probably all but i haven't looked at every brand worldwide) contain fishmeal from wild fisheries.

And switching the world from animal agriculture to vegetable or cell line based protein wouldn't weaken the big biotech's, if anything it would sure up their bottom line. And in the end wouldn't save a single shrub in the end as forests are pushed, burned & lazer leveled for soy etc.

Things are rarely as simple as they seem.

Can i put 2bob each way on massive sudden release of methane hydrate?

I spose that's just catastrophic environmental degradation, so i'm with Whitewind on that.

[Stillman]

be careful what you wish for, ww3 is on the cards

the problem now is mans technology far outweighs his wisdom

most of civilisation would cease in just a few hrs, no human in the northern hemisphere would survive

if you see Russia invade Iran the yanks will get upset and kabooooom, Russia needs oil too and usa is getting control of it, Russia is concerned usa will take Iran so they might pre-empt

Iran is the fuse

there is nothing new under the sun, we have been here man times

know this:

we have never made anything and not used it, nothing ever

 

Thats a bit out there Pete. Your welcome to your views of course. I mean the bit about Russia Iran and the US. Russia is not short of oil, the USSR is not dead its just very quiet.

Edited June 23, 2012 by Stillman

[ballzac]

[Yavimaya]

Theres no way i would eat test tube meat.

Nothing humans make is better than nature.

I see test tube meat as a pandoras box which would have the potential to create/ mutate already horrible diseases that could escape and infect proper animal populations, Along the same lines as our "saviours" anti-biotics, which have basically just become super bacteria factories.

Nothing good will come of test tube meat.

lower the worlds population by 3/4 and eat proper meat, problem solved.

[nothinghead]

Care to elaborate on how synthetic meat could create horrible new diseases? I'd like to understand the science behind your claim.

[Yavimaya]

I am not a scientist, lets establish that first, i dont work on fake meat. I, nor anyone has any idea what might come in the future because of fake meat.

Well, i suppose the easiest way to "explain" it would be. How did diseases/virus', etc form in the first place?

If a living creature can get diseases/ have diseases develop simply because there is a host/victim there - with the ability to fight off such diseases, then i cannot see having the same living meat without an immune system as being a good thing.

Without acutally having the virus, such meat would be the equivelant of a creature with AIDS, unless pumped full of antibiotics, anything which came in contact with it while it was "alive and being grown" could threoretically infect it, with nothing to inhibit that.

Because this would be a mass produced product with no ability to defend itself, it would be open to a wider range of diseases than would not normally effect that "species".

I suppose to me, asking how diseases could develop/mutate/ distribute through such a product is like asking how antibiotics can create a super bacteria..... after all antibiotics kills bacteria, its not bacteria steroids.... but humans cannot think of every situation, which is why we have super bacteria when all people wanted to do is kill them.

Edit: Spelling.

Edited September 14, 2012 by Yavimaya

[nothinghead]

I'm pretty sure the in vitro meat is grown in a sterile environment, and certainly wouldn't be in contact with/susceptible to many common animal diseases. Parasites, nervous system disorders, eye diseases, etc. would all be non-issues for flesh grown in a sterile environment.

[ballzac]

Agreed. The ways parasites are normally transmitted between livestock will not be an issue here. This will raise other issues, such as having to have a sterile enrironment, but that's not such a big deal. Producing meat that doesn't harbour diseases will be akin to producing wine that doesn't turn to vinegar, which has been pretty easy for industry to achieve for a long time. In fact, meat produced in this way could potentially last a long, long time if it was sealed, in the same sterile environment, before leaving the production facility.

Besides, it's not going to be long before growing replacement organs will be commonplace, and if there are any problems associated with this process, then we'd better sort them out. Choosing not to use technology in this way is not really an option for our species.

I don't really understand the comparison with anti-biotics as a way to point to possible dangers, considering the many millions and millions of lives saved by antibiotics since their discovery. Yes, superbugs now exist that would not have existed previously, but without other options, that's just an unfortunate side-effect of something that is overwhelmingly good.

We used to have no way of combating infectious agents. Even if a superbug that we had absolutely no way fighting with any antibiotics we could ever produce suddenly developed, we'd still only be back to square one, with an unbeatable organism, and no worse off.

[Sallubrious]

I haven't kept up with this for way too long (obvious by my up coming questions)

Roughly how many times can a mammalian muscle cell divide in vitro before it stops ?

I know it's a vague question as there are many cell types that fall under this broad banner, but are there there still fixed limits or have they been circumvented ?

Do the telemere sequence and telemerase enzymes regulate this process ?

I'm just trying to think of the implications for maintaining cultures etc.

[shortly]

I would imaging they would keep a master on ice like is done with shrooms, or given the current state of emerging tech they could probably just print a new master once a cell line starts to deteriorate.

Whats the general conciseness here; If a human muscle cell line were used would it still considered cannibalism? or just another food item?

[nothinghead]

Interesting question. given that cannibalism is the eating of flesh/organs from another human being it is likely that a lump of flesh derived from some human cells would be considered a being. though i doubt whether the possible causes (related to morality or disease) for the cannibalism taboo would be relevant to lab-grown human flesh (although there'd likely be a different set of ethical questions).

[whitewind]

The idea of test-tube meat gets more and more weird the more I find out about it. Some people consider eating animals not too far removed from cannibalism, one can't help but have some sympathy with this idea, especially when it comes to intelligent beings like whales, dolphins, and monkeys. If you are prepared to eat test-tube meat, then I don't see why you shouldn't consider getting your protein from bean mash or similar. The texture would be the same. The idea of test-tube meat then becomes quite ridiculous, and we should go back to Darklight's comment about how environmentally destructive it is, how energy intensive it is to produce compared to field-grown crops like beans.