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The lab of the United States Congress has had them beaten to this discovery for years now. On a serious note, I can see great potential for this, but the quest

The lab of the United States Congress has had them beaten to this discovery for years now. On a serious note, I can see great potential for this, but the question is raised: Does the damage caused by creating the input outweigh the benefits of the output? What is necessary to create it, and is it worth it monetarily? Does it truly decrease suffering or is there some aspect we are missing?

jerf 17y ago
We can't answer those questions until someone tries to scale it up, which will be a ways off yet. However, it is not hard to imagine that it will be radically more efficient than current systems; you won't be maintaining much-less-useful organs in the pig, you won't be gated by the efficiency of the pig's digestive system (which is good as biological digestive systems go, but it's still a biological digestive system), you won't have the gut bacteria creating undesirable and effectively uncontrollable methane emissions, etc. (Some sort of waste will still exist, but it will be controllable, and the odds that it can be profitably used in some other application are much higher; methane is valuable when collected, it's just very difficult to collect from mobile animals.) It's hard to do a full accounting, but it's hard to imagine how it won't be a much better environmental choice than current techniques. This, by the way, is a small example of why I don't think total ecological panic is entirely justified. There are bad things happening for sure and we should take steps, but the implicit assumption that so many people hold that technology has already reached its apex is very wrong. Can you imagine a meat factory that takes the waste products from the meat, uses on-site solar power to re-energize the waste products back into biological food, and feeds them back to the meat with extremely high efficiency and only simple, safe inputs to the system? I can. (When I say "panic", I mean the emotional response, not that you shouldn't be concerned about anything.)
- alex_stoddard 17y ago
  I am less sanguine on the efficiency issue. You have also thrown away very useful tissues comprising things like a functioning immune system and the circulatory system (gas and nutrient exchange and waste removal/filtration). I would expect "lab meat" to demand much more purified, processed and energy intensive inputs than traditional farming. Laboratory cell culture is a hard and very expensive enterprise.
- wooster 17y ago
  Cattle rancher here. The amount of energy it takes to run a cattle ranch is dwarfed by the amount of energy it takes to, say, air condition a moderately large office building. In this case, you'd probably be air conditioning a huge factory. And what would you feed the lab meat? Some sort of sugar slurry? I'm not sure how that's any better than corn. Or, in your posited scenario of "re-energizing" waste, are you going to cook it? That takes a lot of energy. If not, you're going to end up with serious problems if you create a closed loop protein system (think BSE). Then the big energy inefficiencies come when you start packing, shipping, refrigerating, and then throwing away (most of it, sadly, as most people don't buy deep freezers) your protein.
  - jerf 17y ago
    The amount of energy that you pay for is dwarfed by air conditioning, certainly. But if we're going to talk environmental impact, you have to count all the other inputs, too. It would certainly start out less economical, but I still wouldn't care to bet about the final outcome if everything is considered. To some extent it would depend on your accounting; "tons of carbon" isn't my personal favorite.
    - wooster 17y ago
      What other inputs? Sunlight and water? Grass is an efficient way of harvesting solar energy. If you're talking about a growth cycle which doesn't involve animal fertilizer inputs, you've got to have a huge external energy source involved to manufacture fertilizer, so that's a pretty big cost of not raising animals on available pastureland. That, and don't even get me started on methane emissions, which is a handy way to deflect discussions about CO2, but not a great way to actually do anything productive (look up radiative forcing and the relative atmospheric lifetimes of greenhouse gases).

jerf 17y ago

We can't answer those questions until someone tries to scale it up, which will be a ways off yet. However, it is not hard to imagine that it will be radically more efficient than current systems; you won't be maintaining much-less-useful organs in the pig, you won't be gated by the efficiency of the pig's digestive system (which is good as biological digestive systems go, but it's still a biological digestive system), you won't have the gut bacteria creating undesirable and effectively uncontrollable methane emissions, etc. (Some sort of waste will still exist, but it will be controllable, and the odds that it can be profitably used in some other application are much higher; methane is valuable when collected, it's just very difficult to collect from mobile animals.) It's hard to do a full accounting, but it's hard to imagine how it won't be a much better environmental choice than current techniques. This, by the way, is a small example of why I don't think total ecological panic is entirely justified. There are bad things happening for sure and we should take steps, but the implicit assumption that so many people hold that technology has already reached its apex is very wrong. Can you imagine a meat factory that takes the waste products from the meat, uses on-site solar power to re-energize the waste products back into biological food, and feeds them back to the meat with extremely high efficiency and only simple, safe inputs to the system? I can. (When I say "panic", I mean the emotional response, not that you shouldn't be concerned about anything.)

alex_stoddard 17y ago
I am less sanguine on the efficiency issue. You have also thrown away very useful tissues comprising things like a functioning immune system and the circulatory system (gas and nutrient exchange and waste removal/filtration). I would expect "lab meat" to demand much more purified, processed and energy intensive inputs than traditional farming. Laboratory cell culture is a hard and very expensive enterprise.
wooster 17y ago
Cattle rancher here. The amount of energy it takes to run a cattle ranch is dwarfed by the amount of energy it takes to, say, air condition a moderately large office building. In this case, you'd probably be air conditioning a huge factory. And what would you feed the lab meat? Some sort of sugar slurry? I'm not sure how that's any better than corn. Or, in your posited scenario of "re-energizing" waste, are you going to cook it? That takes a lot of energy. If not, you're going to end up with serious problems if you create a closed loop protein system (think BSE). Then the big energy inefficiencies come when you start packing, shipping, refrigerating, and then throwing away (most of it, sadly, as most people don't buy deep freezers) your protein.
- jerf 17y ago
  The amount of energy that you pay for is dwarfed by air conditioning, certainly. But if we're going to talk environmental impact, you have to count all the other inputs, too. It would certainly start out less economical, but I still wouldn't care to bet about the final outcome if everything is considered. To some extent it would depend on your accounting; "tons of carbon" isn't my personal favorite.
  - wooster 17y ago
    What other inputs? Sunlight and water? Grass is an efficient way of harvesting solar energy. If you're talking about a growth cycle which doesn't involve animal fertilizer inputs, you've got to have a huge external energy source involved to manufacture fertilizer, so that's a pretty big cost of not raising animals on available pastureland. That, and don't even get me started on methane emissions, which is a handy way to deflect discussions about CO2, but not a great way to actually do anything productive (look up radiative forcing and the relative atmospheric lifetimes of greenhouse gases).