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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted lab-grown meat.

Not the kind that looks like sludge, but the kind that would be indistinguishable from a beef patty you buy at the store, not least because it would be a more efficient way of producing food at scale.

But also because some of that technology would also eventually be applied to the creation of human organs.

And I'd like to live in a world where the waiting list for an organ transplant is just a few hours for everybody.

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> But also because some of that technology would also eventually be applied to the creation of human organs.

I'm not sure that this is true.

I mean, it might be in the sense that the technology for cultivating yeast could be applied to human organs.

But to my knowledge there's not much going on in lab-grown meat that could be applied to producing functioning organ tissue, let alone building the full organ in all its parts and making it compatible with the host.

That’s not true. A lot of it is applicable, and a lot of lab grown meat comes from lab grown organ growing (an active area of research). From the process of initiating stem cell differentiation and growth to the creation of the scaffolding matrices, the difference between growing lab meat and growing, say, a heart, isn’t wildly divergent. The heart has more precision in its structure and function, but the material and processes are very similar. Other organs are more complex for certain. I’d note that people with injuries or burns also benefit from being able to grow muscles (aka meat) as well as skin.

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