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Comment by simmerup | Hacker News Reader

What I find weird about lab grown meat is that it runs into all sorts of problems like how the cells have a lack of immune system so entire batches can be ruined by one errant germ.

I think we’re going backwards by trying to replace the natural bio reactor of the body with steal and piping. It’s all too labour intensive. To make this work we’ll need to genetically engineer an animal that has only the parts we’re interested in. Including skin to replace the steel bio reactors.

Cows due to generations of selective breeding are already remarkably close to this.

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The milk most people drink is proceeded in facilities that look much the same, because whole batches of it are ruined by a single germ, since it has no immune system either.

We also have to pasteurize it. Or we don't, and germs from cows are hundreds of times more likely to make us sick, despite generations of selective breeding.

To make this analogy complete you’d have to compare current milk production to some fictional milk that would require far less human processing and facility investment.

I understand you’re saying the challenges lab grown meat faces arent insurmountable, but short of some outside influence (statutory interference?) I don’t see how it can compete with traditional cattle on the cost perspective

Cattle production, especially large scale for more efficient meat production (ie. chickens and pigs in very small spaces) is already somewhat outlawed.

I could see it being further outlawed/discouraged as climate change starts to bite

Yeah, me too. It wouldn't help much, of course, but it's a popular way to do something.

At 380 ppm anything that doesn't either directly alter reflectivity of the atmosphere or drastically lower CO2 in the atmosphere is just not going to work.

> The milk most people drink is proceeded in facilities that look much the same, because whole batches of it are ruined by a single germ, since it has no immune system either.

But you're not growing milk in those facilities, only storing and processing it. That's an important distinction, because it means with milk it's totally fine to deal with those "single germs" with long-understood sterilization techniques.

If you try to sterilize your "lab grown meat" cultures to deal with the germs, you're going to destroy your "meat" too.

Well, sterilizing the meat is the same as cooking it. The problem is keeping it sterile while it's growing/brewing. It can be done, as has been with breweries, but it is os not an easy task.

> Well, sterilizing the meat is the same as cooking it.

Once you have it.

> The problem is keeping it sterile while it's growing/brewing.

This is what I was talking about.

> It can be done, as has been with breweries, but it is os not an easy task.

I think growing meat in a vat is only superficially similar to brewing beer.

I recall a very old sci-fi story in which bored scientists at a remote space outpost, well, some of them really missed milk. So they decided to try to produce it. But then that needed some kind of circulatory system to support the udder, and that required a filtration system, and an oxygenation system, and a way to get nutrition into the circulatory system ...

They ended up building a kind of exploded steel cow, all pipes and vats and such. It seems we are heading in this direction.

I have often wondered what it would be like to start with a cow, then engineer it to be anencephalic, then start paring away "features" or moving them around. Skip the legs, but do have networks of heart-like cells providing a contractile rhythm for the muscles, and so on.

I think that would be immoral because you would be mutilating an already sentient, intelligent animal. Better start bottom up.

No, because anencephalic.

I recall another article on the subject that said lab meat needed purified amino acids as food for the culture, and that many amino acids just aren't sold in the necessary quantities. A cow, on the other hand, needs only grass because it has extensive equipment to generate those amino acids from grass, called a digestive system.

The amino acids are generally supplied as - I kid you not - fetal bovine serum.

There are ways to produce them by breaking down soy protein or pea protein (plain old acid hydrolysis, perhaps microwave enhanced - plus filtration; less cleanly enzymatically too), but it's another expensive step... And then you need to scale this process up.

I don’t understand your point. Are you saying you prefer we continue torturing cows for our benefit because otherwise we are putting too much effort?

Preference doesn’t come into it. My point is effectively that I can’t see how the current process will be scaled up to be economical enough for widespread adoption.

No they're not. Cow milk, fresh from the udder spoils in something like 16 hours. Most people cannot tolerate the milk, even if you're lactose tolerant, and it has various hormones in it that if you drink it long term would, uh, let's just say one would be able to notice the difference in your body in the swimming pool, especially if you're male.

To fix this it is processed in food factories that you can describe as squeaky clean massive installations of ceramic tiles and shining steel.

Sorry, I’m comparing a cows body with its heart and skin to keep out pathogens and immune system to protect it and mouth to ingest nutrients, vs a steel bioreactor with steel skin and piped nutrients and a clean room/disinfectant for an immune system.

I’m not talking about cow milk

How do you propose they fix the milk in processing? Are you saying they are removing hormones from milk before bottling? I need some data about all these things you are claiming.

They burn them, breaking up any proteins that are "too large" which includes a lot of stuff.

They burn hormones? Where did you learn this?

When you heat proteins they become unstable. Long chains become unstable first. So when you heat suddenly or not that high long chains break, but proteins still remain proteins, they just have a very high chance of losing their function.

Where did you learn that they do this to destroy hormones?

This comment is largely incorrect.

Raw milk is generally better tolerated than homogenized/pasteurized milk. However, in the early 1900s, as supply chains lengthened and the travel time for largely un-refrigerated milk from cow to table increased to days, we found that milk was a primary source of food-borne infections. The absolute risk was still low, but the relative risk was high. Thus, pasteurization became common and in most places, mandatory.

People have drunk raw milk for millennia and have not suffered from hormone-related effects..including people on dairy-centric diets. If you're talking specifically about rbGH, it's very easy to find milk free of it, which I would recommend anyway - I'd hazard a guess that's more common. It’s disputed that it has any ill effects, but I’m totally on board with not risking it.

Everything else aside, powerlifters aren’t recommending crazy diets like gallon-of-milk-a-day (GOMAD) and bodybuilders aren’t paying out the nose for human breast milk because milk has estrogenizing effects.

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