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.
Washington, D.C. has been growing animal-free pork for the last two centuries.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
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.
Food of the Gods. (Arthur c Clarke)
Itâ(TM)s only fair to warn you, Mr. Chairman, that much of my evidence will be highly nauseating; it involves aspects of human nature that are very seldom discussed in public, and certainly not before a congressional committee. But I am afraid that they have to be faced,; there are times when the veil of hypocrisy has to be ripped away, and this is one them.
You and I, gentlemen, have descended from a long line of carnivores. I see from you expressions that most of you donâ(TM)t recognize the term. Well, thatâ(TM)s not surprising-it comes from a language that has been obsolete for two thousand years. Perhaps I had better avoid euphemisms and be brutally frank, even if I have to use words that are never heard in polite society. I apologize in advance to anyone I may offend.
Until a few centuries ago, the favorite food of almost all men was meat-the flesh of once living animals. Iâ(TM)m not trying to turn your stomachs; this is a simple statement of fact, which you can check in any history bookâ¦
Why, certainly, Mr. Chairman, Iâ(TM)m quite prepared to wait until Senator Irving feels better. We professionals sometimes forget how laymen may react to statements like that. At the same time, I must warn the committee that there is very much worse to come. If any of you gentlemen are at all squeamish, I suggest you follow the senator before itâ(TM)s to lateâ¦
Well, if I may continue. Until modern times, all food fell into two categories. Most of it was produced from plants-cereals, fruits, plankton, algae and other forms of vegetation. Itâ(TM)s hard for us to realize that the vast majority of our ancestors were farmers, winning food from the land or sea by primitive and often back breaking techniques; but that is the truth.
The second type of food, if I may return to this unpleasant subject, was meat, produced from a relatively small number of animals. You may be familiar with some of them-cows, pigs, sheep, whales. Most people-I am sorry to stress this, but the fact is beyond dispute-preferred meat to any other food, though only the wealthiest were able to indulge this appetite. To most of mankind, meat was a rare and occasional delicacy in a diet that was more than ninety-percent vegetable.
If we look at the matter calmly and dispassionately-as I hope Senator Irving is now in a position to do-we can see that meat was bound to be rare and expensive, for its production is an extremely inefficient process. To make a kilo of meat, the animal concerned had to eat at least ten kiloâ(TM)s of vegetable food â"very often food that could have been consumed directly by human beings. Quite apart from any consideration of aesthetics, this state of affairs could not be tolerated after the population explosion of the twentieth century. Every man who ate meat was condemning ten or more of his fellow humans to starvationâ¦
Luckily for all of us, the biochemists solved the problem; as you may know, the answer was one of the countless byproducts of space research. All food-Animal or vegetable-is built up from a very few common elements. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, traces of sulphur and phosphorus-the half-dozen elements, and a few others, combine in an almost infinite variety of ways to make up every food that man has ever eaten or will ever eat. Faced with the problem of colonizing the moon and planets, the biochemists of the twenty-first century discovered how to synthesize and desired food from the basic raw materials of water, air and rock. It was the greatest, and perhaps the most important, achievement in the history of science. But we should not feel too proud of it. The vegetable kingdom had beaten us by a billion years.
The chemists could now synthesize and conceivable food, whether it had counterparts in nature or not. Needles to say, there were mistakes-even disasters. Industrial empires rose and crashed; the switch from agriculture and animal husbandry to the giant auto