5 ms·

This is a good demonstration of the point that artificial organs don't have to be the same as the real thing, they just have to be similar enough for the subset

This is a good demonstration of the point that artificial organs don't have to be the same as the real thing, they just have to be similar enough for the subset of tasks desired. This is especially true for chemical (liver) or cell (thymus) factory organs. Just because the research community can't yet manufacture blood vessel networks needed for large organs doesn't mean they can't use fully or mostly functional organoids to produce benefits. It is possible in principle to patch a diseased liver with many organoids, or put thymus organoids into lymph nodes, and so forth. This sort of thing will get underway in earnest if there isn't any real movement on the blood vessel network problem within the next few years.

Teever 9y ago
I've been thinking the same thing for food production. To me the whole in vitro meat burger thing is the wrong place to start. It's too hard to get taste, texture, and appearance right. I wonder if it is easier to develop a bio 'machine' that produces chicken eggs. Imagine a world where eggs didn't come from chickens, but they came from a small toaster sized appliance on your counter top. What if this little box could produce eggs daily and you just needed to keep it plugged in and top up the protein/carbohydrate slurry reservoir periodically. It doesn't matter what this tissue would look like, or taste, or smell. All that would matter is that it produced eggs.
- smeyer 9y ago
  Why would it be easier to make a biological mechanism that produces whole and usable chicken eggs rather than a commercial-scale process for ground beef? It's not like they're trying to create a whole cow, and the ground aspect is easier than the texture requirements of something like a steak.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - snerbles 9y ago
    A chicken egg is a single "cell" grown over a number of weeks, whereas beef is composed of many tissues with varying cell types grown over several months. I'm not a biologist, butcher or genetic engineer...so take my answer with a dash of seasoned salt. EDIT - Corrected
    - Dove 9y ago
      Egg yolks are one of my favorite examples of things that look simple but really, really, really are not. Its structure is intricate, much like a Chinese set of nested spheres carved from a single block of jade. We see the first layer of structure whenever we cut into a hard-cooked egg. Where heat gels the white into a smooth, continuous mass, the yolk sets into a crumbly mass of separate particles. The intact yolk turns out to consist of spherical compartments about a tenth of a millimeter across, each contained within a flexible membrane, and so tightly packed that they’re distorted into flat-sided shapes (much like the oil droplets that egg yolk stabilizes in mayonnaise; see p. 626). When a yolk is cooked intact, these spheres harden into individual particles and give the yolk its characteristic crumbly texture. But break the yolk out before you cook it so that the spheres can move freely, and it becomes less granular. What’s inside these large yolk spheres? Though we think of the yolk as rich and fatty, in fact its chambers are filled mostly with water. Floating in that water are sub-spheres about one hundredth the size of the spheres. The subspheres are too small to see with the naked eye or to be broken up by a kitchen beating. But they can be seen indirectly, and disrupted chemically. Yolk is cloudy because these subspheres are large enough to deflect light and prevent it from passing through the yolk directly. Add a pinch of salt to a yolk (as you do when making mayonnaise) and you’ll see the yolk become simultaneously clearer and thicker. Salt breaks apart the light-deflecting sub-spheres into components that are too small to deflect light—and so the yolk clears up. And what do the subspheres contain? A mixture similar to the liquid that surrounds them in the spheres. First, water. Dissolved in the water, proteins: hen blood proteins outside the subspheres; inside, phosphorus-rich proteins that bind up most of the egg’s iron supply. And suspended in the water, subsubspheres about 40 times smaller than the subspheres, some of which turn out to be familiar from the human body. The subsubspheres are aggregates of four different kinds of molecules: a core of fat surrounded by a protective shell of protein, cholesterol, and phospholipid, a hybrid fat-water mediator which in the egg is mainly lecithin. Most of these subsub-spheres are "low-density lipoproteins," or LDLs—essentially the same particles that we keep track of in our own blood to monitor our cholesterol levels. Stand back from all these spheres within spheres and the picture becomes less dizzying. The yolk is a bag of water that contains free-floating proteins and protein-fatcholesterol-lecithin aggregates—and these lipoprotein aggregates are what give the yolk its remarkable capacities for emulsifying and enriching. McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking (Kindle Location 2093). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Where does the protein-carbohydrate slurry come from? A farm? Why not just let the chicken hang out on the farm in the first place, and eat the nutrients itself? I can't help but feel like the whole in vitro food movement is missing something fundamental. Energy has to come from somewhere. You can make a solar panel that generates food. You can make that food resemble what would come from a farm. But what's the benefit of having this solar food machine vs an expertly run farm a la http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ http://www.polyfacefarms.com/? The farm makes a bunch of animals and people happy. It is a beautiful place. It is an efficient use of solar resources, probably more efficient than any machine we'll be able to build in the next 50 years. To me there are two facts that both in vitro meat people and vegans seem to have a hard time accepting: 1) There's a limited amount of solar energy hitting the planet. It's either going to your food, or it's going to a wild ecology. It's a zero sum game, and animals either die, or are ecologically aborted in order for you to live. The only question is the number, and what life is like for the animals in your foodshed, whether you eat them or not. 2) For any given chemical process, there are already animals who are basically doing that process close to optimally. Replacing an animal with a solar machine isn't actually any kind of kindness. They like existing. They enjoy it. Exterminating a flock of happy chickens and replacing them with machines is mean. In the long term, it seems obvious to me that some combination of plant-heavy cuisine + expertly run, animal-included farms + ecologically sensitive hunting in wild spaces is the solution that gets you the most animal happiness per square foot of solar activity. Maybe in vitro meat can help out during this period of excessive meat consumption culture, but I just don't see how the math works out in the long run. And there's still this whole hand-wavy "costs and energy will come down" thing which hasn't technically happened yet, although people like to talk about it like its a foregone conclusion. Falafel sandwich for lunch, eggs benedict on Sunday, tempeh Reubans on Tuesday. That kind of diet keeps humans and chickens happy and is as close to absolute solar efficiency as I can imagine. I just don't see how a solar egg fits into that picture. Is there some other animal living under the solar panel that you prefer to a chicken? Solar farm snakes or something?
  - MereInterest 9y ago
    I think your second point of the harder one. The optimization of a cow is not toward making meat. Rather, it is toward making more cows. In vitro meat does not need to have a digestive system. It does not need to have skin, or teeth. It does not need to avoid necrosis. All it needs to do is taste good and provide nutrition. If the end goal is meat, I think there are a lot of places where gains in efficiency are possible.
- pvaldes 9y ago
  There is also the part of "Please, insert insects, grain, live worms and lots of dirt in your machine". The problem is that powder processed protein could be more expensive than eggs.
notyourwork 9y ago
In most basic form, isn't this what a pace maker is? Its not a heart and doesn't replace an organ but serves a functional purpose.

Teever 9y ago

I've been thinking the same thing for food production. To me the whole in vitro meat burger thing is the wrong place to start. It's too hard to get taste, texture, and appearance right. I wonder if it is easier to develop a bio 'machine' that produces chicken eggs. Imagine a world where eggs didn't come from chickens, but they came from a small toaster sized appliance on your counter top. What if this little box could produce eggs daily and you just needed to keep it plugged in and top up the protein/carbohydrate slurry reservoir periodically. It doesn't matter what this tissue would look like, or taste, or smell. All that would matter is that it produced eggs.

smeyer 9y ago
Why would it be easier to make a biological mechanism that produces whole and usable chicken eggs rather than a commercial-scale process for ground beef? It's not like they're trying to create a whole cow, and the ground aspect is easier than the texture requirements of something like a steak.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- snerbles 9y ago
  A chicken egg is a single "cell" grown over a number of weeks, whereas beef is composed of many tissues with varying cell types grown over several months. I'm not a biologist, butcher or genetic engineer...so take my answer with a dash of seasoned salt. EDIT - Corrected
  - Dove 9y ago
    Egg yolks are one of my favorite examples of things that look simple but really, really, really are not. Its structure is intricate, much like a Chinese set of nested spheres carved from a single block of jade. We see the first layer of structure whenever we cut into a hard-cooked egg. Where heat gels the white into a smooth, continuous mass, the yolk sets into a crumbly mass of separate particles. The intact yolk turns out to consist of spherical compartments about a tenth of a millimeter across, each contained within a flexible membrane, and so tightly packed that they’re distorted into flat-sided shapes (much like the oil droplets that egg yolk stabilizes in mayonnaise; see p. 626). When a yolk is cooked intact, these spheres harden into individual particles and give the yolk its characteristic crumbly texture. But break the yolk out before you cook it so that the spheres can move freely, and it becomes less granular. What’s inside these large yolk spheres? Though we think of the yolk as rich and fatty, in fact its chambers are filled mostly with water. Floating in that water are sub-spheres about one hundredth the size of the spheres. The subspheres are too small to see with the naked eye or to be broken up by a kitchen beating. But they can be seen indirectly, and disrupted chemically. Yolk is cloudy because these subspheres are large enough to deflect light and prevent it from passing through the yolk directly. Add a pinch of salt to a yolk (as you do when making mayonnaise) and you’ll see the yolk become simultaneously clearer and thicker. Salt breaks apart the light-deflecting sub-spheres into components that are too small to deflect light—and so the yolk clears up. And what do the subspheres contain? A mixture similar to the liquid that surrounds them in the spheres. First, water. Dissolved in the water, proteins: hen blood proteins outside the subspheres; inside, phosphorus-rich proteins that bind up most of the egg’s iron supply. And suspended in the water, subsubspheres about 40 times smaller than the subspheres, some of which turn out to be familiar from the human body. The subsubspheres are aggregates of four different kinds of molecules: a core of fat surrounded by a protective shell of protein, cholesterol, and phospholipid, a hybrid fat-water mediator which in the egg is mainly lecithin. Most of these subsub-spheres are "low-density lipoproteins," or LDLs—essentially the same particles that we keep track of in our own blood to monitor our cholesterol levels. Stand back from all these spheres within spheres and the picture becomes less dizzying. The yolk is a bag of water that contains free-floating proteins and protein-fatcholesterol-lecithin aggregates—and these lipoprotein aggregates are what give the yolk its remarkable capacities for emulsifying and enriching. McGee, Harold. On Food and Cooking (Kindle Location 2093). Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
Where does the protein-carbohydrate slurry come from? A farm? Why not just let the chicken hang out on the farm in the first place, and eat the nutrients itself? I can't help but feel like the whole in vitro food movement is missing something fundamental. Energy has to come from somewhere. You can make a solar panel that generates food. You can make that food resemble what would come from a farm. But what's the benefit of having this solar food machine vs an expertly run farm a la http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ http://www.polyfacefarms.com/? The farm makes a bunch of animals and people happy. It is a beautiful place. It is an efficient use of solar resources, probably more efficient than any machine we'll be able to build in the next 50 years. To me there are two facts that both in vitro meat people and vegans seem to have a hard time accepting: 1) There's a limited amount of solar energy hitting the planet. It's either going to your food, or it's going to a wild ecology. It's a zero sum game, and animals either die, or are ecologically aborted in order for you to live. The only question is the number, and what life is like for the animals in your foodshed, whether you eat them or not. 2) For any given chemical process, there are already animals who are basically doing that process close to optimally. Replacing an animal with a solar machine isn't actually any kind of kindness. They like existing. They enjoy it. Exterminating a flock of happy chickens and replacing them with machines is mean. In the long term, it seems obvious to me that some combination of plant-heavy cuisine + expertly run, animal-included farms + ecologically sensitive hunting in wild spaces is the solution that gets you the most animal happiness per square foot of solar activity. Maybe in vitro meat can help out during this period of excessive meat consumption culture, but I just don't see how the math works out in the long run. And there's still this whole hand-wavy "costs and energy will come down" thing which hasn't technically happened yet, although people like to talk about it like its a foregone conclusion. Falafel sandwich for lunch, eggs benedict on Sunday, tempeh Reubans on Tuesday. That kind of diet keeps humans and chickens happy and is as close to absolute solar efficiency as I can imagine. I just don't see how a solar egg fits into that picture. Is there some other animal living under the solar panel that you prefer to a chicken? Solar farm snakes or something?
- MereInterest 9y ago
  I think your second point of the harder one. The optimization of a cow is not toward making meat. Rather, it is toward making more cows. In vitro meat does not need to have a digestive system. It does not need to have skin, or teeth. It does not need to avoid necrosis. All it needs to do is taste good and provide nutrition. If the end goal is meat, I think there are a lot of places where gains in efficiency are possible.
pvaldes 9y ago
There is also the part of "Please, insert insects, grain, live worms and lots of dirt in your machine". The problem is that powder processed protein could be more expensive than eggs.

notyourwork 9y ago

In most basic form, isn't this what a pace maker is? Its not a heart and doesn't replace an organ but serves a functional purpose.