Re:Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to di...
by adrian_b on Thursday September 23, 2021 @02:46AM
(#28625916)
While all the problems presented in the article are true, none are fundamental.
What is true is that there is no chance of sustainable production of lab-grown meat in 10 years and it is doubtful whether 20 years might be enough.
All the problems described just show that the current approach of trying to grow isolated muscle cells in an artificial device does not have chances to be efficient.
While most parts of an animal are not needed to grow meat, there remains a need for some simplified circulatory system, excretory system, respiratory system (this is the easy part) and digestive system (e.g. to transform the proteins from food into the amino-acids needed by the cells).
Currently the functions of these missing systems are implemented by extremely expensive and inefficient artificial devices.
As the article says, it is very unlikely that these bioreactors could ever be improved to have performances similar to a living animal.
So what is needed is not an artificial bioreactor with muscle cells, but a genetically-modified simplified animal, something worm-like made mostly of beef-like muscle but containing the required systems for feeding and growing.
Even better would be a plant growing some muscle tissue instead of fruits, but designing something like that would become possible only even further in the future.
Currently we do not know enough to modify an animal to grow only the organs that we want and in the shape that we want.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that sometime in this century and probably in its first half, we will reach the point when we will have this ability (unless humanity destroys itself before that, which unfortunately is something that cannot be completely dismissed).
What is true is that there is no chance of sustainable production of lab-grown meat in 10 years and it is doubtful whether 20 years might be enough.
All the problems described just show that the current approach of trying to grow isolated muscle cells in an artificial device does not have chances to be efficient.
While most parts of an animal are not needed to grow meat, there remains a need for some simplified circulatory system, excretory system, respiratory system (this is the easy part) and digestive system (e.g. to transform the proteins from food into the amino-acids needed by the cells).
Currently the functions of these missing systems are implemented by extremely expensive and inefficient artificial devices.
As the article says, it is very unlikely that these bioreactors could ever be improved to have performances similar to a living animal.
So what is needed is not an artificial bioreactor with muscle cells, but a genetically-modified simplified animal, something worm-like made mostly of beef-like muscle but containing the required systems for feeding and growing.
Even better would be a plant growing some muscle tissue instead of fruits, but designing something like that would become possible only even further in the future.
Currently we do not know enough to modify an animal to grow only the organs that we want and in the shape that we want.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that sometime in this century and probably in its first half, we will reach the point when we will have this ability (unless humanity destroys itself before that, which unfortunately is something that cannot be completely dismissed).