The Mass Production of Living Tissue 157
An anonymous reader sends in this moderately disturbing quote from Gizmodo:
"I'm touching a wet slab of protein, what feels like a paper-thin slice of bologna. It's supple, slimy, but unlike meat, if you were to slice it down the center today, tomorrow the wound would heal. It's factory-grown living tissue. The company behind the living, petri-dish-grown substance known as Apligraf hates my new name for it: meat band-aid. 'It's living,' Dr. Damien Bates, Chief Medical Officer at Organogenesis, corrects me. 'Meat isn't living.' But no one argues with me that this substance is really just a band-aid. A living, $1500 band-aid, I should say. Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. But Organogenesis is not interested in creating boutique organs for proof of concept scientific advancement. They're a business in the business of mass tissue manufacturing — and the first of its kind."
Science Fiction Reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was kind of thinking that. Obviously wound treatment is the first market for this kind of thing, but it will surely be used for food production sooner or later -- basically, as soon as the cost of a pound of lab-grown beef falls below the cost of a pound grown the old-fashioned way as part of a cow. I suspect that will be a while yet, but it seems inevitable. At which point we will see food wars like nothing we've seen yet. You think people get passionate about genetically engineered plants? Heh.
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Donated? Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
So what's the big deal, boys are going to be circumcised anyway, why not profit from it?
It's the profit motive that's the problem.
Parents report being pressured by hospital staff to circumcise their newborn sons. In fact, the anti-circumcision organization IntactAmerica.org was originally funded by couple in response to their disgust at having been pressured to have their boy cut.
Infant boys' foreskins may be very valuable to tissue engineering companies but they are more valuable and rightfully belong to the boys themselves.
Infant circumcision is an unnecessary amputation that cannot be refused by the prospective amputee himself. That makes it a forced amputation, a very serious human rights violation.
Circumcision advocates within the CDC are now pushing to get the agency to endorse circumcision as an HIV preventative. Sounds great, but if you read further there is no real claim of effectiveness. You still have to wear a condom if you want to be actually protected from infection. The circumcision-HIV experiment has already been conducted on a mass scale and the result was negative. America has the highest circumcision rate in the developed world and also the highest HIV rate. Perhaps that's why circumcision advocates are careful to say that you still need to wear a condom. Being cut is simply of no use in fighting HIV.
So why push parents to have their baby boy cut when it's not going to protect him from anything?
Follow the money. Amputating infant foreskins is a billion dollar business. And now someone else wants his foreskin, the tissue engineering companies.
The mass production of living tissue would be a fine development if it didn't depend on infant foreskins. Treating non-consenting minors as a source of spare parts violates our most basic ethical standards.