$375,000 Lab-Grown Beef Burger To Debut On Monday 221
sciencehabit writes "If you take some scientists' word for it, the biggest agricultural revolution since the domestication of livestock is starting on Monday — in an arts center in London. At a carefully orchestrated media event, Dutch stem cell researcher Mark Post is planning to present the world's first test-tube hamburger. Its patty — financed by an anonymous billionaire — is made from meat that Post has laboriously grown from bovine stem cells in his lab at an estimated cost of $375,000, just to prove a point: that it is possible to produce meat without slaughtering animals."
It tastes like.... Despair? (Score:5, Funny)
Cue the Better of Ted jokes...
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If only I had mod points...
And craps like... (Score:2)
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For those who don't get the reference (which I was immediately pulling up as soon as I saw the topic title; sorry for the low quality):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezEMnzmDYZU [youtube.com]
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For those who don't get the reference (which I was immediately pulling up as soon as I saw the topic title; sorry for the low quality):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezEMnzmDYZU [youtube.com]
Good ol' Ted, taken from us far, far too soon...
"This tastes... familiar..."
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Beats meat (Score:5, Funny)
Scientist says you can't beat meat. Now that's cultured!
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That's why I prefer my baby seal freshly clubbed by another baby seal while the mother is forced to watch.
Re:Beats meat (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever had veal?
I love a good steak, or burger but I stopped eating veal when I saw how those calves were raised.
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Yes, and I think it was missunderstood. I should have gone for something more obvious. How about
Scientist spends $375,000 beating meat in his lab. He says it's cultured.
or
Scientist spends $375,000 trying to beat meat in his lab.
Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Good result.
Yes, it's expensive now. It's a prototype. Aluminum once cost more than gold.
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I like the concept of 100% taste-prep-whatever compatible meat being created without any harm to animals or the environment whatsoever. It's a net-benefit for society. Benefits animals, the land, and probably overall would help take a universal step-forward in our consciousness in a sort of "now we don't harm animals because we can avoid it" kind of way.
I just wonder how hard it will be to make that switch, even if the food pans out to be perfect. I mean, would "this was a real animal" honestly make a diffe
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the next generation just takes for granted that you don't eat living animals
As a side effect, they will be able to see a live cow only at a zoo. Eventually they will be extinct. Domesticated cattle cannot live outside of a ranch, and there won't be any ranches left.
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As a side effect, they will be able to see a live cow only at a zoo. Eventually they will be extinct. Domesticated cattle cannot live outside of a ranch, and there won't be any ranches left.
Doubtful -- there will always be a few ranches left to cater to the gourmet/fetish crowd.
In any case, even if cows did go extinct, it's not clear that would be such a bad thing. Assuming they also figure out how to synthesize ice cream, of course.
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A large number of unique breeds that exist today for specific purpose will be gone. You will end up with only a handful - a couple for meat, a couple for milk, and that's all. Small populations will disappear by dissolving in larger populations. Some herds will be just shipped to the beef processor while the plant is open.
But there is a larger question here. What is more humane: to create millions of calves, let them live for a couple years, and then kill them - or to not let them be in the first place?
Re:Nice (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, the current cost is meaningless. I once had a £60,000 keyring. It was a prototype graphics chip - a one off, produced for testing. We had a few more made, each time with a few mods, before the button was pressed for mass production, at which point you could buy the whole graphics card for about £70 or so. That initial £60,000 it cost to tool up for each prototype was just a meaningless number - they were never going to be made individually so you have to factor it into the overall cost/profit formula later on. If synthetic meat catches on - and it's completely, totally obvious that it will (because at some point soon the choice will be synthetic meat or no meat at all) - the cost will rapidly undercut the cost of raising livestock.
Good luck selling it (Score:5, Funny)
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Can I ... (Score:3)
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Yes. That will be $375,001 please. Would you like fries with that? Only $50,000 more.
Is it really food? (Score:3)
It's just a $375,000 failed lab experiment until somebody dares eat it.
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I don't know, how many? Do you know of many?
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"Failed", in this case, has nothing to do with cost. It is the question whether it's actually food if nobody dares to eats it.
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Hellfire. I'd eat the thing as long as it's properly cooked.
Has been done before... (Score:5, Interesting)
Symbiotica did this before [tcaproject.org] in 2003 by growing tissue from skeletal muscle cells harvested from pre-natal sheep. And they ate the results.
There are two major hurdles with non-violent cultured meat for eating though:
1) Edible meat is a very complex tissue with muscles, fat, blood vessels, etc. and the precise relation of these cell types and their physical placement in the meat affects the taste and texture.
2) Most cell culturing media is not vegetarian - the nutrient baths are generally processed from living animals.
It sounds like this new effort is basically the same thing - culturing myoblasts and feeding them with fetal calf serum.
At the same time, I look forward to these challenges being overcome, and glad to see new funding!
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Doesn't save animals (Score:5, Informative)
FTA:
There are other problems: Cultured meat is now grown in medium with fetal calf serum, a supplement made from blood collected at slaughterhouses; scientists have yet to find an alternative that doesn't involve dead animals.
Re:Doesn't save animals (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon we'll have cow blood-donors.
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Soon we'll have cow blood-donors.
Don't the Maasai own the patent on that?
what about the unborn cows??? (Score:2)
I mean, were those fetal stem cells or adult stem cells that they used?
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But... but... meat is murder? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I admit I'm a heterotroph [wikipedia.org]. That means I eat things. There's no way around that. I'm not photosynthetic. I'm not chemoautotrophic [wikipedia.org]. It doesn't matter if it's plant or animal or fungus or various prokaryotes, I live thanks to the death of other living creatures. My heritage has been heterotrophic since sometime when the first eukaryotes started clumping together into multicellular creatures back almost a billion years ago, and some of them realized it was easier to raid other critters and burn it with oxygen than to grow their own. That choice was made a long, long time ago, long before I had enough differentiated nerve cells clumped together to enable me to make a conscious choice about it. Even if they're cultured cells sitting in a growth medium, I'm still responsible for their death. Even if I'm vegetarian, it's a formerly living plant that I'm eating. They die so I can live.
My main and almost only moral concern is that I don't eat other sentient creatures (obviously) and if I do eat reasonably intelligent creatures (e.g., pigs), that they are treated reasonably well during their lifetime until I decide to eat them. I'd sooner ensure a basic standard like that is strictly adhered to than waste $375k on a lab hamburger for the sake of the vain illusion that I'm not killing things to survive. I still am, even at that kind of cost and hassle.
Without slaughtering animals? (Score:2)
Where did they get the stem cells from? Where did they get the foetal bovine serum from?
PETSS (Score:2)
How did they get the Stem Cells? (Score:2)
I am guessing the cow is dead now, and only produced a single hamburger.
Yummy Means Never Endangered (Score:2)
What these people never think about is the fact that these animals being edible is what keeps people breeding, raising and feeding them. Cows, pigs and chickens have never been endangered species because they are (or make) good food. I own 30 or so chickens that I buy food for, built a safe coop for, let out into a pasture every morning and close in each night. I do this because they make yummy eggs.
The bison is no longer endangered because people started raising them for meat. A hundred years ago, t
glad i live in cattle-country (Score:2)
Is this going to be like... (Score:2)
The real question (Score:2)
Producing meat without slaughter (Score:2)
it is possible to produce meat without slaughtering animals.
That really ain't the overriding concern, is it? Synthesizing meat will consume just about the same resources as the animal would. If we allow the animals to live in the same numbers AND we grow synthetic meat, we've just graduated to consuming twice as much resources. For what, an act of ill-informed conscience? And if we start culling the former food animals to reduce their numbers to make way for the synthmeat and because we're not biting chunks out of their asses any more, well doesn't that just put
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Synthesizing meat will consume just about the same resources as the animal would
What makes you think that? Cows aren't a very efficient mechanism for converting grain into beef; about 90% of the grain's calories are wasted in the process. I have no idea how efficient synthesizing beef could become, but it's not like there's no room for improvement there.
If we allow the animals to live in the same numbers AND we grow synthetic meat, we've just graduated to consuming twice as much resources.
Most likely the synthesized meat would cannibalize (sorry) the real-meat market instead.
And if we start culling the former food animals to reduce their numbers to make way for the synthmeat and because we're not biting chunks out of their asses any more, well doesn't that just put us on even shakier ill-informed moral ground than we were on when we were slaughtering and eating them?
That's not what would happen either. The existing cows would be used in the same ways they've always been, but not as many new cows would be conc
Finally, some GMO meat for my GMO bun! (Score:2)
A century from now... (Score:2)
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People will look back at us and find it disgusting we ate corpses.
You can brainwash a child even today. No need to wait for a century.
However no mental gymnastics can obscure the fact that humans are predators. You can live in a tower, surrounded by food synthesizers and whatnot. But if that tower one day crumbles and drops you into a forest, you *will* eat every corpse you can come across, and you will make many new ones in the process. Those who won't will die. Plants that you can find in a forest, o
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Computers are stupid because they rely on a developed industrialised economy and would worthless in an apocalyptic scenario \s
However, as I live in a developed industrial economy and I am "surrounded by machines that make my wishes real"...
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..and if they have the same smarmy, arrogant attitude as yourself and the rest of the PETAtards, I won't worry about what they'll think of me.
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Because part of it stems from the fat
Sell now all of the taste is from stems.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I'd be more worried about texture.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why it's a hamburger. The entire point of mechanically pre-chewing cheap meat is to destroy its tough, inedible texture. You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
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You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
No. No you cannot.
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You can make a somewhat passable simulation of ground beef out of soy beans, for heavens' sake.
No. No you cannot.
Yes you can. You might not like it, but as a carnivore who enjoys a cool center rare steak, I can tell you that a lot of those soy protein burgers taste okay. Do they taste exactly like hamburger? nope. But not everything in life has to taste like hamburger. Ice cream for instance.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO, soy is at its worst when its trying to be something else.
Its sort of like the uncanny valley. If you come out and say "hi, Im tofu", its fine. If you try to be steak, everyone will know something is wrong (even if theyre not sure what) and it will taste terrible.
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Interesting)
rRe: I wonder about the taste (Score:3, Insightful)
Since you try to sell them as meat substitutes he damn sure wants something that doesn't make him miss meat at every bit
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But hamburger ought to taste like hamburger. If you're using substitute hamburger "meat" to make a hamburger, it ought to be like hamburger. It's irrelevant that ice cream doesn't taste like hamburger, because ice cream isn't being passed off as hamburger.
But first you have to decide what hamburger tastes like. I had my first veggie burger during a long day of public service work. Earlier in the day, I had a regular burger. This was cooked by a guy who really enjoyed flame action on the grill. The hamburger really didn't taste very good at all. So I went back later in the day, and decided to give the veggie burger a try. It tasted pretty good, and a whole lot better than the "real" hamburger.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm a dedicated carnivore, think that mo
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to worry about the taste and texture of synthetic meat, try this one on for size:
http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/06/15/shit-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces-video/ [infiniteunknown.net]
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http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2011/06/15/shit-burger-japanese-researcher-creates-artificial-meat-from-human-feces-video/ [infiniteunknown.net]
What, that asshole is at it again?
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course, I seriously doubt it will be as tasty or have nearly as good mouthfeel as a burger from a real cow, but this is a very important, early step in a long chain of necessary inventions to truly replace animals as a meat source.
However, if culture medium *does* matter, then that become yet another variable to tweak in producing the tastiest meat, and it's almost certain that we'll be able to improve on nature by, say, eliminating the taste of fear and stress in meat.
We'll also theoretically have the ability to grow sterile meat if we can use sterile inputs. Imagine meat that can stay vacuum sealed on the shelf with no refrigeration for months and still taste fresh!
Re:I wonder about the taste (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine meat that can stay vacuum sealed on the shelf with no refrigeration for months and still taste fresh!
That's available now. [omahasteaks.com] Irradiated meat is available, but not widely sold. There are some tricks to preserving taste, one being to vacuum-pack and freeze to -30C before irradiation.
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But what if the stress or fear is what makes real meat taste so good?
Carnivores are evolved to eat freshly hunted and killed prey, not sickly weak prey unaware or uncaring that it's about to die.
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That being said, I still prefer naturally sourced meat. Lab grown meat is going to lack all the flavor of having lived life. Beef is already hard to get at good quality because we condense a 3-4 year growing phase to 13 months for most.
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But what if the stress or fear is what makes real meat taste so good?
Carnivores are evolved to eat freshly hunted and killed prey, not sickly weak prey unaware or uncaring that it's about to die.
Maybe surprise tastes better than stress or fear, and that's why many predators try to catch their prey unawares. A quick burst of "What the..." for that extra something special.
Hardly. They try to catch their prey unawares because it uses less energy and has a better chance of success to creep up 125 yards on a gazelle and then give chase at 25 yards than to simply chase it down from 150 yards.
While the meat industry may strive to do so, I doubt that there is an abbattoir anywhere in the world that has managed to completely remove stress and fear from the livestock about to be slaughtered. On the contrary, I suspect that immediately before the "What the..." moment, there is a gr
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The prey is certainly aware when it dies, just some predators make that awareness shorter than others.
I think the shortest time period would be like if you passed a stop sign, and halfway into the intersection you catch a glimpse as somebody else blows right past it and straight into you, followed by approximately 15 seconds of slowly fading to black, with or without struggling. That split second of fear would be the minimum that the prey feels IMHO, with an endorphin and/or adrenaline spike potentially can
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Every time someone says "mouthfeel" I have an inexplicable desire to punch something.
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Every time someone says "mouthfeel" I have an inexplicable desire to punch something.
Might I suggest a bottle of Fiji water? You may find that the soft mouthfeel of the artesian water translates into a soft fistfeel and spares your knuckles from the consequences of your aggression.
no spoiler (Score:2)
lol, no one appears to have looked at what that medium is and the fact they only found one suitable medium at the moment.
You really don't want to know so if you want to know you have to read it yourself ;)
20000 protein strands grown in XXXXXX and mashed together to make a patty. eww. Doesn't sound like meat, doesn't look like meat, really doubt if feels like meat...actually tasting anything like a burger would be incredible. In fact we could then debate how you can do that...not holding my breath tho ;)
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Because part of it stems from the fat the animal grows; part from it's diet; I would even go as far as to say from the landscape the animal was grown in.
Will this meat flavor depend on the culture medium it was grown?
I seem to recall the guy did a TED talk a few months ago where he pointed out this fact -- growing muscle from stem cells has been doable for quite some time; the trick was (and is) to grow all the parts that make it tasty. He still hasn't (or at least hadn't back then) been able to reproduce marbled meat, but he's been able to grow the right proportions of meat, fat, and tissue cells to make a ground beef substitute. I presume he could do the quantities to order, for different tastes. I'd think the cult
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> It will take a lot to ever convince me that something synthetic can taste the same as something that
> was alive and running around with blood
No, it will take as long as it takes to bite it and taste it. You'll be able to make a snap judgement immediately.
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I don't think that is the case, because I think there will remain in most people this knowledge that it "is not from a real cow" which will affect the taste. Maybe not objectively (as in, the Pepsi/Coke taste test), but in the same way that someone is certain they can discern the flavor of a $100/bottle wine and a $500/bottle of wine, until you give them a taste test where they can't tell the difference. This is why I think it would be something that current generations would have a hard time accepting, but
Re:Don't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
> Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing.
Or they'll replace racks of chick-filled trays with racks of cultured meat once it becomes more profitable, if only as a premium high-margin item.
The big thing that's going to keep this from ever becoming cost-effective is the electricity it's going to take to exercise it by contracting the fibers over the course of their "life". Remember, most of what we call "meat" is REALLY "muscle", with incidental amounts of fat. Flabby muscle doesn't taste the same as exercised muscle. That's 90% of the reason why cows raised for meat are allowed to roam mostly out in the open instead of being kept in pens as veal. Pigs and chickens in close quarters will climb over each other and spend their lives trying to avoid getting trampled. Cows are just too big & heavy for that to work. They HAVE to be allowed to roam around for exercise. Otherwise, half of them would kill the other half long before they were old enough to slaughter.
As for opposition from "farmers", think about it for a minute. The poultry industry has basically perfected large-scale vertically-integrated corporate factory farming. The likelihood that any cultured meat could be even remotely cost-competitive with it is basically "nonexistent". That leaves beef, where there's a clear divide between ranchers and slaughterhouses. If ranchers decide it's more profitable to culture meat instead of ranch it, there's nothing the slaughterhouses can do about it. If slaughterhouses decide it's more profitable to culture meat than kill it, there's not much the farmers can do about it. More importantly, the states where ranchers are powerful aren't quite the states where slaughterhouses are powerful, so there's not going to be any kind of "united front".
The truth is, ranchers don't *like* sending animals to be slaughtered any more than the people who own the slaughterhouses *like* killing them. If they could cost-effectively get away with herding cattle into a robotic slaughter chamber, closing the soundproof doors, pressing the "go" button, and walking away to watch neatly-packaged meat emerge (regardless of the horrors that might occur inside the chamber), they'd do it in an instant.
Cultured meat will never replace good steak, and can't possibly be cost-competitive with factory-farmed poultry. That leaves hamburger & sausage as potentially-viable markets. My guess is that someday, nouveau-vegetarians will be able to enjoy guilt-free cultured hamburgers & sausage that's certified to be slaughter-free, and everyone else will eat hamburgers & sausage that are some cost-effective combination of ground beef/pork and cultured beef/pork.
We'll probably get to have some entertaining theatre when various sects of Judaism gets around to arguing about the 21st-century definition of "Kosher" in the context of meat that was technically never slaughtered, and might even see something truly perverse, like Kosher cultured meat guaranteed to be cloned from the cells of humanely-slaughtered animals (vs non-slaughtered animals), and a huge media orgy someday when Kosher cultured beef ends up getting served to a NewVegan who ordered cultured beef cloned from cells harvested from calves released into nature parks (where they're promptly killed & eaten by bears, cougars, wolves, and (in Florida) pythons).
Your forgetting Water (Score:3)
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It will take a lot to ever convince me that something synthetic can taste the same as something that was alive and running around with blood pumping through its brains and a nervous system that spent time outdoors.
If they succeed won't it take... one bite? Maybe one double blinded bite if you don't trust yourself to be objective?
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With IPSC [wikipedia.org] you could take a skin patch, wait a month or two, then get enough of meat derived from you to eat.
Hey, if you were a hot dog, and you were starving, would you eat yourself? Because I sure as hell will. I'll be so delicious.
And no, I won't be doing it just to quote that SNL sketch.
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Also, if I'm allowed to eat test-tube meat, why can't I eat a test-tube baby?
A valid concern. Just my layman guess is that human tissue would provide maximum nutrition for a human to eat. How would you like to go to a lab to get a few of your tastiest cells sampled and cloned to be made into food tailored just for you? Mmm! I'm hungry now! Dinner time here. I'll have a me burger.
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One of the problems with that is that things tend to build up. The only reason why Mad Cow was a problem was that it wasn't just one generation of cow being fed to another, it went on for several generations, leading to a build up in prions. Normally, the prions wouldn't be common enough to cause the sorts of problems that are seen with mad cow.
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My gosh, this is the second time I've gotten a reply on here that taught me something after years of use. Thank you, sir.
You are a fucking asshole. (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming the price comes down once the economy of scale kicks in, this would be a far less destructive staple than traditional meat.
You claim you have pangs of guilt for supporting the realities of the meat industry.
Yet you would reject the product unless it tastes nearly identical (and has additional nutritional advantages).
Basically you're saying, if it doesn't taste exactly like what I'm used to eating, I don't give a fuck how many billions of gallons of water are wasted raising cattle, I don't care how
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There can be a huge range of processes building this beef in the future. If current processed food is a model, this stuff could turn out to suck big time. Not because of physical necessity but corporate/government decisions.
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Or you can taste it and see instead of waiting to be convinced.
You are allowed to eat meat - hence you are allowed to eat test tube meat.
You are not allowed to eat babies - hence you cannot eat test tube babies.
Is this c
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Just remember that God invented cows to make grass fit for human consumption!!!!
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Hey, I asked why it would be acceptable/ethical to do one and not the other. I didn't say I wanted to actually do it.
I donno but honestly I think you're on to something... Billionaires become Billionaires because they have no souls and are sociopaths. I bet they would pay huge amounts of money to eat babies. Sounds like a great startup idea to me!
Taste the future...
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So would it be acceptable if I -- I mean, some anonymous philanthropist -- commissioned brainless test-tube babies?
We usually want to prevent it (or at least detect it in time for a relatively early termination, rather than a "Give birth to ghastly alien baby, watch it die" scenario, which is the alternative); but the fact that anencephaly occurs from time to time in humans suggests that there might actually be a (comparatively) accessible mechanism for inducing it artificially in an early-stage embryo.
I can't imagine anybody, ever, getting a signoff from the IRB do to it with humans; but it'd be interesting to know if
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Pink slime looks disgusting, but the truth is, if you were given a hamburger containing pink slime (with the usual artificial flavors and processing), and another hamburger made from low-quality pure ground beef, you'd probably think the one made with pink slime tasted better. At the very least, in double-blind taste tests, you'd probably give the pink slime burger a 4 or 5 out of 5 for "authentic barbecue flavor" and "savory texture", and say the all-beef (low-quality) burger was dry & tasteless. You'd
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If they're putting msg in these fake meat and veggie burgers, I'm staying away.. that shit gives me horrid headaches, along with many other additives.
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The first electronic computers took up entire floors of office buildings, consumed insane amounts of power, required ridiculous amounts of maintenance per running hour for just a few thousand calculations per second. It wasn't really economically feasible to imagine anything but the largest governments or academic or commercial interests ever being able to afford one, and yet, 70 years later, one of its descendants sits in my pocket, with a processing and memory capacity millions of greater than those first
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eniac was worth every dollar in practical utility value... dunno if the same can be said about this.
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The rewards that await anyone who could mass produce lab-grown meat would be pretty substantial. Proof of concept demonstrates that it can be done, now someone can work out how to do it cheap. Right now, it's a gimmick. In fifty years, well, I have a feeling that for a lot of folks in the industrialized world, this may be a major source of protein.
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So your "feeling" is all you have? Are you also expecting flying cars to be the norm, intelligent robots and a sustainable colony in Mars? Look up the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" sometimes, I have a "feeling" you are a prime example of it.
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So? ENIAC was not a "stunt", but a needed tool. It was significantly better than what it replaced, and that also includes cost per calculation. This "beef" is a far, far more expensive "substitute", that is of worse quality in addition. So it is not worthwhile doing it now and it may never be. ENIAC was very much worthwhile doing in th economic sense and in the sense that something comparable was needed and missing.
Your comparison is so stupid, it is staggering. I think you have not understand even the smal
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The problem with that is things like this require scale in order to bring the costs down. But, if people aren't interested in eating enough of it to make it cost effective, the price won't come down. And if the price doesn't come down, it's going to continue to be viewed as disgusting pink slime.
In other words, you wind up with a catch-22 and ultimately there's no particular reason to go for this. There's plenty of other areas where we could help the environment and eating a small amount of meat as a part o
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Usually how these issues resolve is some company with "vision" decides that this is the future, and invests a lot of capital into making it work. If their vision is right, and demand can be created, they will profit, and the technology will improve. If its wrong, they will fade into obscurity.
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That's not at all the same thing. Computers, even then served a purpose, but this pink slime doesn't serve a purpose. Meat of any origin shouldn't be making up a large part of your diet anyways. And the planet can definitely support enough livestock for us all to eat 10-30% of our diet from meat.
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... but this is still "killing the animal". Those cells could have been carefully cultivated and grown into a sizeable bull-dick for me, personally, to graft to my loins. I could have given it life and it, in turn, could have definitely given life to me in return. And now somebody's just going to eat it? Well, fine, eat my dick. That doesn't make you a super hero.
Everything will be ok Misses Clinton...
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could have fed a lot of people regular cows. Or anything else for that matter.
Just sayin'.
How much does a regular cow really cost? [wikipedia.org]
At least with his $375,000 you've got most of the costs all in one place; this is almost exactly what it costs with the current no-scale inefficient techniques he used. Probably (but not necessarily, depending on the resources needed) be significantly cheaper than animal-grown meat when scaled up to the same volume and the inefficiencies in mass production limited.
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If we weren't supposed to eat animals, they wouldn't taste so good.
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It's the fat that's delicious.
I hate fat, and I always remove it from beef. The taste of remaining meat is just fine. Perhaps my cooking habits are too harsh for some people, but I never eat meat unless it is very well done. (By that time all the fat melts out.) The lengthy, high temperature cooking also kills most of undesirable lifeforms.
I would be perfectly fine with a vat-grown meat. I only need proteins from it, not taste. I have no love of eating. If you can condense a daily, or even monthly mea
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Okay, you've grown meat in a test tube, but who's going to eat it?
I think they'll find people who are ok with relatively tasteless vat-meat.
http://blu.stb.s-msn.com/i/1D/D8A8C7A676F88DD879380F9695414.jpg [s-msn.com]