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$375,000 Lab-Grown Beef Burger To Debut On Monday
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."
Cue the Better of Ted jokes...
...Paul McCartney?!
Scientist says you can't beat meat. Now that's cultured!
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?
Good result.
Yes, it's expensive now. It's a prototype. Aluminum once cost more than gold.
> 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.
Given the reaction to GM crops you think the EU will embrace the Frankenburger? Much like the monster it will be vilified, misunderstood and eventually driven out and destroyed.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
It's just a $375,000 failed lab experiment until somebody dares eat it.
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Just remember that God invented cows to make grass fit for human consumption!!!!
Symbiotica did this before 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!
baby shaped meat patties...hmmmm
personally i will take boob shape ones if i have a choice.
Also, if I'm allowed to eat test-tube meat, why can't I eat a test-tube baby?
You can but then you have to wait 18-20 years and marry it.
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.
... 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.
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 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 future generations would simply take as matter of fact.
This just in: research costs money!
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 behemoths.
ENIAC cost about $6 million USD in current monetary value to build, and my iPhone probably costs $100 to $200. The whole point is that the first try at anything is going to be atrociously expensive and likely inadequate in many ways and yet, all things begin somewhere.
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I mean, were those fetal stem cells or adult stem cells that they used?
Look, I admit I'm a heterotroph. That means I eat things. There's no way around that. I'm not photosynthetic. I'm not chemoautotrophic. 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.
eniac was worth every dollar in practical utility value... dunno if the same can be said about this.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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 doing this with animal fetuses might be more economically viable than doing 'pure' tissue cultures. Animals are, after all, pretty well adapted to growing tissue when provided with food, and anecephalic animals aren't exactly capable of suffering. I wonder how long you can keep one growing on life support...
"Human beings aren't supposed to eat animals because ALL human beings who kill animals are visibly neurotic, and sociopathic"
I totally lost it here, 10/10 if serious, 6/10 if trolling
Where did they get the stem cells from? Where did they get the foetal bovine serum from?
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People for the Ethical Treatment of Stem Cells
I am guessing the cow is dead now, and only produced a single hamburger.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Okay, you've grown meat in a test tube, but who's going to eat it? The whole point of real meat is the flavor that's imparted to it through its feed and husbandry. There's a reason why some people raise and slaughter their own cattle, or grind their own meat, or buy the frozen patties from the warehouse club store. This whole thing is like a Concept Car: Sure, it can be done; sure, it's as expensive as hell; sure, it can be eaten; but who in their right mind is going to eat it? I have a feeling this is going to be Post's "Blinky Moment", where the 3-eyed fish is cooked and served, but whether it's edible or not is a whole different story.
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...
A test tube baby wouldn't be very much meat. More interesting question is "will silly people ban the eating of lab-grown meat of human origin."
With IPSC 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.
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.
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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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, there were 800 or so. Now there are over 300,000.
If you couldn't use cows for milk or meat, who would spend the money on fencing, irrigation and hay to keep a herd around?
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it's just as disgusting as pink slime .. ill stay far far far away , Plain and simple : it's disgusting , did i mention it's disgusting ? Cause i really think it's totaly disgusting .
where real cows are raised on dairy farms, and the over abundance of bull calfs are castrated for beef steers, for 375 thousand bucks i could buy a lot of pasture land and stock it with cattle and start my own beef ranch
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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 future generations would simply take as matter of fact.
I think you overestimate people; most people are only peripherally aware that a McDonald's hamburger contains elements that at one point belonged to a living bovine. We've actually got really good as a western culture at disassociating food picked up at a store/eaten at a restaurant with the living things it came from. In short, the future is already here.
Of course, what you ARE going to have is a major backlash from the farming conglomerates who will see their profits vanishing. Hopefully they'll attempt to re-establish the connection between living animals and meat on your plate -- that way we consumers win either way.
when they bite into it. It will taste incredbly gross without adding the beef fat. It's the fat that's delicious.
Surprise!!!
Don't believe me? Go make a burger out of steak tartar, no flecks of white at all. Use a Teflon pan and no cheating with Pam, butter, or a slice of cheese.
Put it on a bun and bite into...the best burger ever?
Meat is nutritious, and moreso than any other food. People debate whether you get everything you need, but it's damn close. But you don't need it for flavor. Better to come up with sawdust and dump beef fat on it.
BTW, red meat raises cholesterol a ton independent of fat, because gut bacteria proliferate in red meat eaters that convert carnetine into stuff that is absorbed and turns into cholesterol.
tl;dr Red meat tastes like shit without fat and is bad for you even without fat.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...week old beef from the fridge when it comes out the other end...
Is this going to be like Olestra - $200,000 roll of toiletpaper sold separately?! :p
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?
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.
80/20 or 75/25?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
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 much pollution modern industrial farming produces, I don't care how many billions of animals will experience cramped, noisy conditions for their brief, unpleasant lives, I am going to continue to demand traditional meat.
Fuck you, you self-centered piece of shit.
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.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
It's pretty easy to tell that human beings are supposed to eat animals.
Humans have omnivorous teeth, and an omnivore-adapted digestive system.
Not herbivorous dentition and an herbivorous gut.
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 us on even shakier ill-informed moral ground than we were on when we were slaughtering and eating them?
Just when more and more folks are balking at GMO veggies... this should go over well (especially since the same type of person who is anti-GMO will likely also lean toward the "be kind to animals" crowd).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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 of your diet does help the environment out.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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 smallest part of my statement. Instead all you seem to have to offer is some fuzzy, pathetic and wrong sense of "new is good".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Since you try to sell them as meat substitutes he damn sure wants something that doesn't make him miss meat at every bit
Hm, you've just come up with a modest proposal...
If we weren't supposed to eat animals, they wouldn't taste so good.
People will look back at us and find it disgusting we ate corpses.
> 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).
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 be amazed/horrified if you knew about the miracles things like artificial smokehouse flavoring and MSG can work on your tastebuds.
The only reason why they don't sell artificial flavorings like the ones added to Burger King's hamburgers at grocery stores is because consumers would abuse them and consume levels a thousand times beyond any amount ever approved for direct human consumption by the FDA (or even tested for safety, period). I forget who it was, but some university actually did some studies with test kitchens and people allowed to prepare their own foods, just to see how much artificial flavor real people would put into their own food if they were allowed to. The researchers were *horrified*. One described it as being like giving a pound of crack to an addict & wishing him a Merry Christmas. People literally went *nuts* with the stuff. Supposedly, one lady actually basted her finger with the stuff, started to suck it, and got so caught up in the moment, she accidentally BIT IT badly enough to end up at the hospital.
It's the same reason why it's damn near impossible to get cats who've grown up with dry food to voluntarily switch to premium wet food. A cat who's grown up eating "kitty crack" will literally *starve himself* to death before voluntarily eating real tuna if you try to switch them "cold turkey" (yes, I know pure tuna isn't nutritionally-complete... I was using it as an example of something I literally tried to get my cats to eat at one time as an experiment after they rejected multiple brands of premium cat food. They wouldn't even look at it until I crumbled ground-up dry food over it, at which point they licked the dryfood-powder from the top).
Buy cow, feed it hay, get vaccinations, sell cow for around $800-$1000, maybe more depending on quality of the beef. Nothing even close to $375,000 and I doubt the cattle ranchers are selling them at a loss.
Hate to break it to you, but cattle ranchers are heavily subsidized (water, methane cleanup, vaccinations, hormones, feed/land, abattoir, shipping) -- these costs just don't come out of their pockets -- but with the lab meat, there are no subsidies; all parts of the tissue growth have to be paid for by the same person.
If you really understood how cows are raised, you would well know that killing them and eating them are the two most humane parts of the process...
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.
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 clear enough?
Those costs indeed do come out of their pockets. You are sadly quite wrong as to the actual ranching industry, having been spoon fed disinformation somewhere. Coming from several generations of ranching, I can assure you, of the things you listed, some are figments of your imagination, and the ones that are real are not subsidized at all. Ranching is a difficult, expensive, and time consuming process. Farming (for grains and plants) on the other hand, is quite subsidized.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
No, there'll just be a ton of 'intellectual' property liens on it instead that'll drive up the price..
which is the other major cost in producing meat. Also land. Electricity has the potential to become cheap if we can get over our fear of nuclear and keep large corporations from disabling/ignoring safety measures to save a buck (re: Tokyo Electric Power).
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Or they'll replace racks of chick-filled trays with racks of cultured meat once it becomes more profitable...
Obviously McDonald's Chicken McNuggets would be prior art.
Life is not for the lazy.
In this case it sounds like it will be much easier to genetically modify algae into producing fibre, protein structure and taste similar to beef. Varieties of kelp should provide the basic structure for a full range of low allergy edible products, mimicking the most used food products of flour, dairy, meat, fruit and vegetables.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
What we need is a Ameglian Major Cow
Well, by your logic, the first transistors were pointless.
They were slow, hard to make, unreliable and not even remotely robust: by the end of WWII, they had developed valves that could be fired from an AA cannon and these were used to make the startlingly effective proximity fuzes.
In other words, the transistors were a complete stunt and worse in almost every measurable way.
Totally pointless really. You can see that because they never amounted to anything.
--
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FYI organic produce usually tastes better than non-organic, so your example and argument kinda of conflict...
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I suspect that they will eventually be able to produce higher quality meat then what is affordable right now, purely because this gives much more control over the development of the meat. I suspect that it wouldn't beat very high quality meat (E.g. Wagu beef) however. In the short term it will taste like crap though
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The fact this alone requires far less land then raising animals traditionally mean that it has practical utility. Theoretically this stuff could be produced in far higher quantities than the planet could support for traditional methods. It goes part of the way towards solving world hunger, if that's not "practical utility value" I don't know what is.
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Yes and when this technology matures it could be used to feed a lot more people artificial cows than can currently be feed with regular cows. (Given land usage and how costs scale with mass production)
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I'm going to guess you didn't actually bother to read the article then:
Yeah you only have to kill the source of the stem cells. So ridiculous!
No! Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells are simply (usually) skin cells that have been 'regressed' back to the state of stem cells. There is absolutely no requirement to kill the source creature. It would be slightly unfortunate if this were the case, as they are currently being used in medical research to treat various issues such as age related macular degeneration (age related blindness) or the creation of artificial livers.
The article could have been spun to be about anything else under the sun, from efficiency to nutrition, and all we can do is kow-tow to the PETAveg crowd?
Spin is the bane of honest reporting. But, again, going back to the article:
"...cultured meat may need 35% to 60% less energy, occupy 98% less land, and produce 80% to 95% less greenhouse gases than conventional meat."
Well, what do you know, other potential benefits of the technology were addressed within the article. The fact that the summary chose to accentuate the possibility of creating meat without killing animals is not really representative of the entire article. In fact, if anything it's quite the reverse:
"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."
However, I strongly suspect that the issue here is not one of inability but practicality. It would be quite possible to take blood from live animals, not killing them, and extract the serum this way. I'm just not sure why you'd bother, given the rate that biotechnology is advancing. We will soon have the knowledge and skills required to create the necessary culture 'soup' or medium, all within the laboratory.
I do find it slightly amusing that the presentation is due to be held in an arts centre. But is it really art?
So what's the use of animals then? because imho if this is really just as tastefull and good as real meat, then it should be forbidden to slaughter animals. but then those animals aren't necesary anymore, and nobody will keep them, which will lead to the extinction of some of those species...
the word "sociopath" has a clinical definition, look it up.
Those costs indeed do come out of their pockets. You are sadly quite wrong as to the actual ranching industry, having been spoon fed disinformation somewhere. Coming from several generations of ranching, I can assure you, of the things you listed, some are figments of your imagination, and the ones that are real are not subsidized at all. Ranching is a difficult, expensive, and time consuming process. Farming (for grains and plants) on the other hand, is quite subsidized.
As I said, the susbidies are not paid by the ranchers themselves -- the costs are all absorbed upstream. I've spent my own time in the ranching industry, and have ho problems with it for the most part, and do not see ranchers as people being propped up by the government. But there's more to ranching than what the ranchers have to immediately deal with.
The US western expansion was built on the backs of ranchers (and gold miners, but only in a minimal sense); as such, it was built to support them (sadly, this is not actively the case anymore, but the structure still exists).. I'm not saying that ranchers get it better than others -- pretty much everything in North America that is natural resource-based is heavily subsidized in this global economy. The one benefit that ranchers have that is not subsizided is grazing land (they get cheap land, but it's a present resource). So, for grazing cattle, the subsidy is significantly less. Would it help if I airquoted subsidy? We're not talking "government pays ranchers to offset costs" here, we're talking "ranchers don't have to pay the full costs of production because many of those costs are already being absorbed by others."
However, most of the world doesn't have land. This means that if you live in, say, Japan, you can't graze your cattle (or really have them anywhere) -- so the production costs between lab-grown meat and ranch-grown meat (and even factory-grown meat) begin to tip in favor of the lab-grown meat.
When the midwest aquifers are dried up and/or the demand for habitable land skyrockets, ranching is going to get a LOT more difficult and expensive than it currently is. Starting the production of lab-grown alternatives now means that by that point, we'll have alternatives.
It is a good gimmick and an awesome stunt.
The real issue with livestock is however that it is becoming physically and economically unsustainable: Soil is getting scarce and crops for livestock food already use up to 1/3 of the arable soil (source: FAO. Any increase of this would mean taking a part of the soil used for vegetable production. And despite what some may say this is not feasible because there are people depending on for their own food that and because despite all, vegetables, energy and utility crops and fruit are still a bigger economical player than livestock (face it: even the vegetarians need bread, jeans and beer). And the Frankemat would still need to hog on the resources that are used nowedays directly for meat production or use a part of the other ones making that it would remain expensive.
I have seen a few interview already here in the Dutch TV and for what I recall the stuff is grown on a substrate made of animal bones and there was some other animal products involved, so that the whole point of "slaughterless meat" is not met either.
Back to the economical aspect. It is important to note that meat has no special magical properties and it is 'per se' not strictly necessary, in fact the only thing that meat has in a certain abundance are essential aminoacids. Proteins are not strictly needed for us to survive: We take them form whatever source and divide them into aminoacids, that's all and it doesn't really matter where we get these from or if we get them directly as aminoacids or as proteins. There are also a few vitamins and non-essential aminoacids such as beta-alanine and glutamine and vitamin B12 that can be found in "natural" red meat (not so in common supermarket meat), but both are also available from artificial sources. Regarding the texture there are also cheaper alternatives available such as Quorn, textured soy or to some extent tofu. Note that I am not trying to advocate for vegetarianism but only to point that there are already cheaper alternatives in the market so that I don't even see that this stuff will ever reach mass production...
Unless, of course, they get the basic material from completely different sources such as micro algae grown in bio-reactors or something like that.... but this seems as far flung as the fision reactors.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
And again, complete fail to understand. You are comparing apples and orange and do not even notice it.
The first transistors were not created at huge cost, they were created as research. Afterwards, they became very quickly cheaper than valves, and my guess is that were so initially (first industrial offerings) if you do TCO and not just the initial cost. But that requires some real understanding, which I doubt you have. And they were superior to valves in a number of ways and inferior in others. It takes understanding valves and transistors to see that, a type of knowledge you obviously do not have. Also, the aim of doing transistors was not to _replace_ valves, it was having a mechanism that works under conditions were valves do not work or work very badly. These technologies do serve different goals. Quite obvious, but again, you have to understand valves and transistors to see that.
Incidentally, there are a number of applications where valves are still superior to transistors or transistors are completely unusable while valves do work. Again, if you had any real understanding of these technologies, you would know that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.