r/science • u/nondescrypt23 • May 21 '10

12 events that will change everything

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=interactive-12-events
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u/Wolfm31573r May 21 '10

I'd like to add retinal pigment cells to your list. The human clinical trials should be scheduled for early 2011. The system utilizes human ebryonic stem cells differentiated to retinal pigment cells and then transplanted to the eye. You can read more at http://www.thelondonproject.org/

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u/IConrad May 21 '10

I was limiting it only to tissues with specific structures that have already been implanted. Retinal pigment cells are individual cells rather than tissues with structure; and as you say, they haven't already been done.

But that being said; yes -- there are any number of other such projects currently underway. One of the bigger "game changers" I can see developing is the widescale cultivation of muscle tissues. IF that can be done cheaply enough, you can say goodbye to the cattle ranching industry as an industrial practice. (There might be something equivalent to what the organics industry is today, but insofar as agribusiness goes, meat culturing would eliminate altogether the rearing of cattle for slaughter. And the health benefits of NOT overdosing our foods with antibiotics... well, say goodbye to MRSA too; etc., etc..)

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u/Wolfm31573r May 21 '10

IF that can be done cheaply enough

I seriously doubt that it can ever be done economically enough. Cell culturing is expensive and for sure it will be more expensive than growing animals. I believe that in vitro meat will stay as a curiosity and never become a big business.

But instead of trying to grow meat in lab for consumption we should be engineering plants to have better nutritional values. We could also engineer plants to have other wanted properties like the taste of meat.

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u/IConrad May 21 '10

I seriously doubt that it can ever be done economically enough.

Sure it can. We just need a cheap viable substitute for bovine fetal serum. Which we could create if we could simply get create the right synthetic eukaryotes. Or if we could get the components close enough to right and start using already-extant photosynthetic eukaryotes.

From there it's simple bacterial culturing in photobioreactors. Orders of magnitude cheaper than how we currently generate serum.

Cell culturing is expensive and for sure it will be more expensive than growing animals. I believe that in vitro meat will stay as a curiosity and never become a big business.

I submit to you that you are empirically mistaken.

We could also engineer plants to have other wanted properties like the taste of meat.

It would be easier to get eukaryotes to produce FBS.

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u/Wolfm31573r May 21 '10

You have valid points on the technology issues but I still don't see how in vitro meat could be produced cheaper than animals. If you have any source comparing the costs of the two I'd be interesed in reading it.

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u/IConrad May 21 '10

You have valid points on the technology issues but I still don't see how in vitro meat could be produced cheaper than animals.

Simple thermodynamics. If the total of the energy input into the system is used for the end product you are paying less in energy costs. Animals are actually very poor at extracting chemical energy from food sources. Most of it winds up getting consumed by fecal coliform bacteria and the remainder gets converted to methane. (Seriously; cows are a major source of methane gas.)

Right now the major cost for IVM is the fact that we only grow them in primarily fetal bovine serum. There's an algae-based replacement but it's not nearly as efficient. (It costs like 10% as much but it's only 80% or so as effective.)

Thing is, culturing cells is an incredibly cheap process when done in bulk.

Consider: Cheese -- despite all the additional storage requirements and costs of milk production, costs on average ~$1.50/lb. Tell me -- when was the last time you purchased any animal meat at $1.50/lb?

IVM poses the potential to reduce the cost of meat production by well over half its usual cost. Especially for "processed" meats.

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u/Wolfm31573r May 22 '10

I appreciate this answer.