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When I first read this comment my immediate reaction was that it was probably baseless fearmongering. After a bit of googling, I feel more ambivalent. 1. It’s
by fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
When I first read this comment my immediate reaction was that it was probably baseless fearmongering. After a bit of googling, I feel more ambivalent.
1. It’s illegal to sell cancerous animal meat.
2. Even if a cancer was capable of living in a human host, cooking and digesting it should neutralize it.
3. Cancer is generally not considered to be contagious, but there are specific cases where cancers actually can move from one host to another. Tasmanian devils spread facial tumors to one another by fighting and exchanging fluids. A lab worker got a tumor in her hand after accidentally injecting herself with colon cancer cells. Cancer can spread during organ transplants.
I wouldn’t be at all worried about catching cancer from eating lab-grown meat. But I do wonder about some edge cases, like what if you cut yourself while you were chopping the raw meat and it got in your bloodstream? That sounds kind of like the case with the Tasmanian devils, or the injected colon cancer. However, I’m not sure if there’s any known case of a tumor from one species spreading to another.
Anyway, this sounds more like a freak event than a pandemic. We’d probably figure it out if it happened to a decent number of people, it’s not like we’d realize after 50 years that millions have died that way. The downside risk doesn’t seem so great that we should avoid developing lab-grown meat. There’s probably a lot of things in your kitchen that could kill you if injected into your bloodstream.
Also, the parent comment was flagged. I don’t find it to be rule-violating, so I vouched for it.
- tomohelix 3y agoNothing is absolute in biology. Your edge case can happen, but the chance it happens is so low that it might as well be your body naturally created the tumor in the first place. As someone who handle cells on a daily basis, I can confidently say these things are the most fragile things ever. You look at them wrong and they will be hurt, literally. What's that? Somebody forgot to feed me today? Welp, time to die. Oh wait, you actually fed me a day earlier? Well, dying time I guess. Hmm, you fed me on the right day but the feed was not warmed up? You guess it, straight to the grave. For them to be frozen, put in a plastic bag, thawed out, left out for an hour, then exposed to your immune system who gonna be overzealous in killing them and asking them to survive and grow into a tumor is like asking is there a chance a cosmic ray gonna flip a bit in my hard drive and completely corrupt all my data.
- Dalewyn 3y ago>like asking is there a chance a cosmic ray gonna flip a bit in my hard drive and completely corrupt all my data. The ECC RAM crowd is quite the vocal audience, to be fair.
- waveBidder 3y agowell there was that one time a speedrunner established a record time by a cosmic ray inducing just the right bitflip. But yeah, people get super weird about cultivated meat for whatever reason. https://hackaday.com/2021/02/17/cosmic-ray-flips-bit-assists-mario-64-speedrunner/ https://hackaday.com/2021/02/17/cosmic-ray-flips-bit-assists...
- autoexec 3y ago> I wouldn’t be at all worried about catching cancer from eating lab-grown meat. And you shouldn't. Cooked or not, the cells are not cancerous https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-lab-meat-cancer-animal-cells-449786524119 https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-lab-meat-cancer-animal...