On 12/04/2009 01:21 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
DNA is destroyed by cooking.
But prions aren't, and that's where mad cow comes from.
Ah yes. Good point. However, as Abd points out you can avoid this by
not eating the brain or spinal chord. And remember, this is cultured
meat, which has big advantages in this regard:
* You start with a single donor cell. So don't use a brain cell!
* You can produce any number of samples from the cell and then test
them for prions or genetic problems such as proteins that do not fold
properly (as you mentioned).
Once you are sure the meat is okay, then you produce a lot of it. I
think I read that a single cell could produce a significant fraction
of the world supply of meat, although it runs out eventually. (Stops
dividing.)
It shouldn't, not if it's a stem cell. Stem cells express telomerase.
Ideally you'd use stem cells for the "main line" and periodically
produce "differentiated batches" of cells for consumption. That
requires a pretty detailed knowledge of the triggers for
differentiation, however, and I don't know if such knowledge currently
exists.
Cancer cells may express telomerase as well -- at least, I'm pretty sure
the really lethal ones do; that's how they can take over the entire body
without running up against the Hayflick limit -- but they're probably
less useful than stem cells for this operation. (For one thing, I'm
afraid there might be a marketing issue with meat derived entirely from
tumors.)
These advantages are similar to the ones derived from cloning. In
fact, it is more or less the same thing, except that cloning is
natural after the first step, and you only get one animal. The point
is, you know beforehand how much meat the animal will have, and what
the quality will be. It also resembles cloning in that concerns about
the safety of cloned animals have been raised. I think these concerns
are reasonable and should be tested for, both for cloning and cultured
meat.
- Jed
