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Comment by reasonattlm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

Please don't use code blocks (indentation) to quote text as it makes it difficult to read due to side-scrolling, particularly on mobile devices. A common method of quoting on HN is to prefix paragraphs with ">". You can also use asterisks to italicize text, which further highlights the text.

For example:

> 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.

It really is quite an annoying problem. Does anyone know why the owners of the site don't fix it? I feel like I could submit fixed CSS in a few hours.

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/? 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?

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.

I'd hope it does avoid necrosis, though.

I don't share your same values. The end goal for me is not just meat. I don't see the sun as just a think that's there to produce meat for me.

That's my point. I think you can get much more off of a square of solar exposure than just meat. And I think a cow is more than a meat factory. The cow's life is intrinsically valuable, and especially if we can have a relationship with the cow, it can make our lives more valuable.

Let's say you succeed in making a beef factory that's more efficient than an optimal cow pasture. Great, what are you going to do with the extra space? Make a movie theater? A theme park? A nature preserve? A cow pasture is a nature preserve!

I think a cow pasture is actually pretty nice. I don't think we need nearly as many of them as we have, and we could stand to eat a lot more plants, but I don't think replacing the cow pasture with a meat machine is really a step forward.

> Where does the protein-carbohydrate slurry come from?

Plants

Because if you've see the kind of "farm" most eggs come from you'll know it's a horrific kind of place.

true, but consumer can choose with their wallet if they're so inclined, you just need the right incentives and at least full knowledge (because market ain't free without knowledge)

i.e. here in Italy you get a code to distinguish between happy chicken in a farm, free range chicken, closed range non intensive and intensive.

besides most of the 'horrible living condition' propaganda is aimed at the uneducated. of course in a large operation as huge as chicken farming there are gonna be mutated ones that get direct to waste - there's an estimate 7.2 billion chicken going around, even only considering normal genetic mutations there ought to be hundred millions yearly to go around to be used in those 'look these horrible sad chicken' videos, that are just a production of numbers and proportions more than actual cruelty (as compared to, say, foie gras)

consumers cant choose with their wallets.

you cant choose with your wallet to buy a model S because your wallet is not fat enough.

most consumers cant choose with their wallet to buy "fair trade happy animal farm" things because their wallets are not fat enough.

then there's even a better value in low price intensive farming, which is availability of food for the poor

I agree with your ecological point but photosynthesis is a 1% efficient process and solar panels are easily available at 17%. So if you can gather the energy to perform the reactions to make the substrates to. Hold protein and carbohydrate in an industrial process, given the losses at each stage (some of which, as you identify, may be highly desirable - cow poo is a great fertiliser and there is a whole ecosystem supported in a hundred acres of land which could easily support 100 head cattle) your efficiency of generation would end up being orders of magnitude higher - quick fermi equation of 17x at solar conversion and guess at somewhere in the order of 50x for direct conversion to protein/cabs and you really do have a highly energy efficient process

That 50x number... you just made that up? Are you thinking about all of the different chemicals in food, or are you just imagining like, a dextrose factory?

I'm deeply skeptical of that number, but let's assume you can make your machine. Why? What good does it do? Why would you want to have a solar food factory when you can just live in an ecology? What's your vision for the Earth? Mine is that it's covered in healthy ecologies that sustain the plants and animals that live in them. It's not just about food, it's about how to enjoy being alive. It's about being connected with the plants and animals that sustain you, not for their sake, but for yours: so you might learn about yourself. Because we're just them, added together.

I don't think an egg protein solar factory that's attached to a VR pod facility is an improvement on a rainforest. I'm happy for the VR pod/egg factory to exist, but I don't think a world covered in them is anything but a dystopian future for us.

Mate

At no point did I say it was a good idea, you're projecting your fears of a technical dystopia upon my pseudo-scientific hypothesising. In fact, if you re read my thread you'll see that I say I AGREE with your ecological point - i.e. I want garden earth. Don't be careless at comprehension. I just said it appears practically possible to improve significantly on the energy conversion of sunlight into not just dextrose but the full biological stack - fats, amino acids and subsequently proteins.

Re the numbers, as I said that was my fermi equation method of getting to it. I know ballpark figures for most of the numbers so in true fermi fashion it's within an order of magnitude of the true figure. I don't care if you're skeptical of the figure, that's not the point of a fermi equation (unless you're the great man himself and get within 5kt of the yield of the trinity nuclear test by dropping a piece of paper)

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.

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.

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