Well said, the shortcomings of EMEM and its variants are pretty well known. The only reason they have not been phased out seems to have more things to do with c

Well said, the shortcomings of EMEM and its variants are pretty well known. The only reason they have not been phased out seems to have more things to do with cost and institutional inertia. Microbiology used to be in a similar place not very long ago, with people trying (and failing) to grow every species in lysogeny broth, a formulation from the 1950s that is not even remotedly close to optimal for any bacterium including lab strains of E. coli. Improvements happened gradually and by the mid 2000s things have been turned around, with more efficient techniques as well as the ability to study things previously considered impossible to culture in a petri dish. I think a similar shift will eventually come to mammalian cell culture, however we probably won't realise until it has already happened.