Cellular agriculture—the production of meat from cells grown in bioreactors rather than harvested from farm animals—is taking leaps in technology that are making it a more viable option for the food industry. One such leap has now been made at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA), led by David Kaplan, Stern Family Professor of Engineering, in which researchers have created bovine (beef) muscle cells that produce their own growth factors, a step that can significantly cut costs of production.
I hope this ends up doing more than simply giving cows cancer:-|
How is lab grown meat going to give cancer to cows?
Cancer is when the body’s cells stop listening to regulation - e.g. they grow despite being told to not grow.
Although in this case, I guess the whole thing inside the bioreactor basically flat-out is cancer.
It might be okay though, if they grow vaguely like cancer grows, but more like regulated cells do?
This isn’t cancer at all.
I understand that reading articles like this while lacking all the requisite knowledge to understand it can make it seem scary, but this tech is not going to create cancerous cells. The “growth factor” they’re describing is a signalling molecule. It binds to certain receptors on stem cells and allows them to differentiate into a particular type of cell, in this case skeletal muscle cells. It does a number of other things besides that help the cell grow, but it is just a signal. The cell itself is doing the work. FGF is an essential component of normal cell growth.
The problem with cultivating cells in vitro is that you aren’t growing a full creature, just certain cells. These cells require a complicated set of signals to grow because they historically exist only as part of a full system. Because we’re only interested in certain parts of that system (skeletal muscle, adipose tissue, connective tissue), we’re the ones that have to signal the cells.
This has been an issue because growth media is hard to acquire and purify, and has historically been taken from cow fetuses (because stem cell differentiation is a large part of the task of growth factors, they are present in large quantities in fetuses). Because it’s difficult to extract and refine, it is incredibly expensive. Additionally, the growth media of today is not terribly specialized - it will contain lots of different types of growth factors, not just fgf.
So the ability to create fgf in a lab is amazing. Not only will it significantly lower the cost, but it will also allow for the creation of tailored growth media, which could potentially speed up the process of growing muscle cells, for example.
Pity the person you replied too didn’t seem to take any of this in. Very well composed post, and I definitely learned something, Thank you.
Sure! It will give us cancer too!
So does regular beef what’s your fuckin point old man
Everything gives you cancer now
No point, I’m just fucking around.