Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Use Stem Cells To Grow Animal-Free Pork In a Lab (digitaltrends.com)
A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports describes research "designed to generate muscle from a newly established pig stem-cell line, rather than from primary cells taken directly from a pig," says co-author Dr. Nicholas Genovese, a stem-cell biologist. "This entailed understanding the biology of relatively uncharacterized and recently-derived porcine induced pluripotent stem cell lines. What conditions support cell growth, survival and differentiation? These are all questions I had to figure out in the lab before the cells could be turned into muscle." Digital Trends reports: It may not sound like the most appetizing of foodstuffs, but pig skeletal muscle is in fact the main component of pork. The fact that it could be grown from a stem-cell line, rather than from a whole pig, is a major advance. This is also true of the paper's second big development: the fact that this cultivation of pig skeletal muscle didn't use animal serum, a component which has been used in other livestock muscle cultivation processes. [Genovese] acknowledges that there are other non-food-related possibilities the work hints at. "There is a contingent interest in using the pig as a model to study disease and test regenerative therapies for human conditions," he said.
Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!
If the aim of veganism is to protect the welfare of animals, and you can clone a cell line from an animal (possibly without even hurting it) then I don't see how this wouldn't ultimately benefit animal welfare.
A cell is a cell. Even the plant cells she's eating originated from a common ancestor with animals (plants and animals are all eukaryotes). So unless she's going out of her way to avoid consuming microorganisms as well, such a stance seems kind of silly to me.
Veganism is indeed a religion. It posits that non-human animals have rights that humans don't have, to wit, the right to eat animals.