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Comment by cosmojg | Hacker News Reader

It's an analog of hemoglobin. What kinds of dangers can it possibly pose?

And prions are regular proteins just folded a bit differently but they give you mad cow disease. Biology can be tricky and even small differences can matter.

I can't tell if you're joking or not. Smoking used to be considered healthy, leeches were healthy, letting blood was how you got over sickness, drinking a mercury-based concoction was once thought to be an elixir of immortality. Maybe coffee is good, maybe it's bad. Maybe wine is good, maybe it's bad. How often are diets shown to not do the things they are supposed to? Humans are wrong about nutrition (and health) a lot. Saying that this is definitely not dangerous seems rather arrogant. With that said, we do the things that seem like the best idea at the time with the knowledge we have, and this does seem pretty safe.

Personally, I'm going to keep eating meat, but I'm kind of old-fashioned

Are you seriously comparing smoking and bloodletting to a veggie burger? What sort of insanity is this

Maybe HN has jumped ship and I need to simply move on.

I'm not saying the concern is right or wrong, but...the sort of people who aren't fussy about what they put in their mouths may be off somewhere happily eating a burger from McDonald's.

Being concerned about the quality of what you consume is likely to be correlated with being skeptical about meat substitutes made in a lab. I suspect the whole project of incorporating a little inherent contradiction.

If you tell me meat is not good for my health, or the planet, and I'm convinced, then I'm going to reason that I should probably just minimize my meat consumption and eat things based on age-old recipes, not be a fanatic about meatless purity or seek out weird meat substitutes.

This may not be an obvious point of view if you see avoiding meat as primarily an animal rights issue and associate it with technological progress.

Generalizing the sanity of an entire platform based on one post that you personally find shocking seems a bit extreme, don't you think?

On the contrary! These sort of absurd reductions of logic from people with no business pretending to be experts(e.g. comparing a veggie burger to smoking or blood letting) appear to be very much par for the course here.

http://web.uconn.edu/mcbstaff/graf/Medical.html

Leeches actually are valid medical science. There just were not better alternatives at the time, and they sometimes can still be used today.

Blocked for me.

    web.uconn.edu uses an invalid security certificate. 

    The certificate is only valid for the following names: web2.uconn.edu, phonebook.uconn.edu, testsite.uconn.edu 

    Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

You are right, edu sites... I changed the link to http.

While leeches have an actual medical use, historical usage of leeches was cargo culting and not science.

I'm on your side, but not too long ago people would just as easily have asked "it's an analog of estrogen, what kinds of dangers can if possibly pose?"

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