Bible: NT: 1 Timothy 4:1 Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, 2 through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, 3 who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.
Disease & Cancer Contamination
https://www.cancercenter.com/community/blog/2017/10/how-does-the-immune-system-work-when-it-comes-to-cancer-its-complicated
Indeed, it is possible, even likely, that your immune system may regularly fight off cancer or pre-cancer on a regular basis without you even knowing it. “We all have a mechanism to filter out a small amount of cancer cells to prevent us from having visible cancer in the body,” Dr. Tan says. “Over time, that balance becomes lost.”
My understanding of the fake meat industry as it stands now, are that the appropriate cells are grown in a suitable nutrient medium in a manner not unlike the growing of someone’s own bit of skin prior to applying as a skin graft to say a burn victim.
https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/complete-human-skin-grown-lab
At the moment, researchers at the EU-funded EUROSKINGRAFT project can grow a seven centimetre square patch of this nearly full-thickness skin in two to four weeks.
How long it will take to produce the meat equivalent of a cow is beyond the scope of this essay as well as the costs of sourcing & processing the nutrient medium that will be required to achieve this.
Instead, my thoughts turn to sterility. The meat isn’t being grown in the presence of any immune system, so one wonders how will the meat-labs keep their product free from disease as it is growing. I presume that the vats might need to get a dose of antibiotics if contamination arises. For depending on how far advanced the batch of steak is, it might be too costly, both in time and money to toss it just because some E.Coli found it’s way in.
And then a functioning immune system, helps to keep the body free from rogue cells. I can imagine that a steak with weird cystic nodules growing in it, will not find too many takers in a fine dining restaurant.
Hence, if it turns out that the labs turn out more ground beef than recognizable slabs – realize what they are probably trying to hide.
Prions & Thalidomide
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-a-prion-specifica/
[…] This evidence has led to the now widely accepted prion theory, which states that the cellular protein PrP is the sole causative agent of prion diseases; there is no nucleic acid involved. The theory holds that PrP is normally in a stable shape (pN) that does not cause disease. The protein can be flipped, however, into an abnormal shape (pD) that does cause disease. pD is infectious because it can associate with pN and convert it to pD, in an exponential process–each pD can convert more pN to pD.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/thalidomide-mirror
The mistake is the oft-repeated notion that the terrible teratogenic effects are only found in one of the two isomers – had the compound been sold as the single active enantiomer, the story has it, all the birth defects could have been avoided.
Wrong. An article in the October issue of Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery (see page 757) helps to set the record straight. There are two problems with the common wisdom, one of which is that the in vivo studies don’t bear it out. It’s true that one enantiomer is more teratogenic in mice than the other one, but this work involved high doses, because mice just aren’t very sensitive to the compound. Humans are, though, unfortunately, and both enantiomers are equally bad in rabbits, who are similarly susceptible.
The second problem shows that the mouse results are actually a surprise. The chiral center in thalidomide isn’t stable under many in vivo [[i.e. in living systems]] conditions, and the compound can be converted to a mixture of both forms no matter which one you start with. In most species, you wouldn’t be able to tell if there was a different toxic potential in the two enantiomers at all, because you’d never be able to dose only one.
Interesting, the compound has made a comeback in recent years as a treatment for some kinds of leprosy, and it’s being investigated in cancer and several other diseases. It has some unique properties. A big challenge, though, is making sure that no woman who’s even possibly going to get pregnant gets near the stuff. . .
Thus far, nobody is talking about creating food from scratch – carbon dioxide, water and minerals. On the other hand, most of the fake meat is being generated either by heavily processed plant matter, or lab grown muscle cells. We can expect that purists will soon demand that labs stop sourcing their inputs from any animals at all. And with attempts to reduce the water and runoff pollutants from plant agriculture, obtaining enough quality plant material and the energy to process it, might soon become prohibitively expensive.
Now trying to make 3-D meat without some prior input from plants and animals is probably not going to happen. Instead food pills with all the meat equivalent ingredients will probably be attempted. I have therefore put the above two extracts to illustrate something to you. Creating a protein (or other) molecule with the correct sequence of atoms is hard enough. Ensuring that it has the correct shape, or that it is folded properly, adds an additional layer of difficulty (and expense). The dangers of doing this incorrectly are very real.
Living cells have complex mechanisms – enzymes, ribosomes and the like – that do this, seemingly effortlessly, all day, everyday. This perhaps has lead to the conclusion that this should be easy to replicate in a lab.
It isn’t.
There are no doubt other concerns. Are they going to grow liver cells? If yes, how are they going to get Vitamin B12 in it given that this chemical compound is actually synthesized by a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in a ruminant’s stomach?
Markus Gorelli (not that Markus the other one!) 