Imagine a world where you have to take whatever "heart" a pioneering lab can produce for under $100. Are you gonna be in the first group of recipients to risk it, knowing that these labs are largely unregulated startups?
I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".
We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.
Unfortunately the alternative for not using a lab grown heart in that scenario would be death, not a human heart. So I’m guessing many people will take it.
Multicellular life naturally exists in a well-ordered matrix according to a rough plan, not a blob in a petri dish, and when it deviates too much from that plan we have various pejorative words for it and feel various health consequences as a result of disordered growths.
Tissue culture in general is more like cancer than not like cancer, even when using "non-cancerous" cell lines. But cancerous and "immortalized" cell lines are particularly useful in cell culture because they don't snuff themselves out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line
tumor (noun) An abnormal growth of tissue resulting from uncontrolled, progressive multiplication of cells and serving no physiological function; a neoplasm
Surimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings.
This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.
The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.
I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.
I had foolishly given them the benefit of the doubt and after poking around their entire damn website site and I now hate them. I couldn't find a nutrition label but buried in text was information I need.
"4-5 grams of protein per 100 gram serving"
"fats derived from canola, sunflower seeds, and algae"
Real Coho Salmon is about 20% protein and 7% fat so we're looking at less than 20% of the important parts being salmon. I retract my previous comment. It's not Salmon.
I believe the FDA defines a minimum of 40% of a meat product to be made of that meat to be labeled as that meat (eg. beef hotdogs needs to be made of 40% beef) and I'm not sure if this qualifies as that.
As a benchmark, the tuna used in a Subway tuna sandwich is 100% tuna, the beef in Taco Bell beef tacos is 88% beef, and the chicken in McDonald's Chicken McNuggets is 100% chicken but make up 45% of the nugget.
To willingly lie about something you need to be able to differentiate truth from fiction. Defamation hinges on either this willing lie ("malice") or on negligence (and the expected due diligence for a self-professed news organization is high). There is a little performative middle ground here, but WHATEVER is argued in court does not moot the things argued at every commercial break about trusting their news institution to report the facts. Fox news is not, and never has been, intended as satire.
> Fox news is not, and never has been, intended as satire
Their homepage right now is featuring a pull up and push up contest between Hegseth and RFK jr.
It hardly appears as though they’re trying to be a legitimate news network. (Same goes for CNN - both are incredibly and undeniably outrageous in their reporting)
But I agree, their audiences take their reporting seriously, even if they themselves are just saying what they say for the ratings.
A light comedy piece or a plucky human interest story do not erase the statements of fact made or the repeated insistence on being taken seriously which pervade the rest of this institution. It isn't even reliant on their audience taking them seriously, it's reliant on the intended tone and how a reasonable person would perceive that intent.
You can argue that Fox News is intended to be basically the Colbert Report satirizing a certain mindset, but it's an obviously bad-faith argument. The Colbert Report was literally created to satirize the seriousness and mendacity of Fox News and its attempts to persuade people into a set of not just interpretations of the world, but factual beliefs about that world.
There is a line, and Fox runs way over the line into defamatory content multiple times an hour.
I can't immunize myself from currency counterfeiting charges by claiming that I never thought the copies were real, that it was all just in fun, that I was pranking the businesses I spent them at, and that my Youtube channel includes other fun bits of me deceiving people and telling jokes. The one does not exculpate the other.
Hogan (Thiel) vs Gawker and Sandy Hook vs Alex Jones provided a blueprint to weaponize defamation law for political change in an environment where right-wing journalism has turned into a defamation pipeline and then a defamation -> moral-panic -> stochastic-terror cannon that would impress Gerald Bull. These are supposed journalistic institutions, and that used to mean something, legally and culturally speaking. Making them terrified of losing the public trust once again, using some type of fast-moving wrecking ball, is a necessary component of a future where we make it out of this.
So all we need now is an angry left-wing billionaire who can launch a thousand defamation lawsuits, or the most sympathetic group of parents of dead children in history.
The last great nightly news anchor was Dan Rather, who was fired symbolically because their organization merely neutrally reported the existence of a sketchy story about possible documents that turned out to be fabricated about George W Bush's military service.
The story wasn't sketchy. Rather's claims about GWB's service were correct and well documented ... it was only the Killian memo that was apparently inauthentic ... but it may well have been transcribed using later technology.
> Hogan (Thiel) vs Gawker and Sandy Hook vs Alex Jones provided a blueprint to weaponize defamation law for political change
Sandy Hook v Jones was not "political". It was deeply, profoundly personal.
The Gawker lawsuit was also about settling personal scores. Obviously Hogan wasn't as sympathetic of a plaintiff as the Sandy Hook parents. But it was more odious because Thiel wanted to punish Gawker simply for hurting his feelings, not lying about him.
> So all we need now is an angry left-wing billionaire
Perhaps if there was, we wouldn't need to have this conversation.
The closest we've got is the zombie husk of liberal George Soros, who is a center-left finance bro from a Holocaust survivor family who isn't fond of authoritarianism. While a constantly mentioned specter of the right (the fact that he's Jewish and talks with a foreign accent factors, for paleoconservatives), and probably the largest single donor to Democratic causes...
He isn't actually particularly left-wing, and his work isn't remotely comparable in scope or in aggression to the ideological warfare waged by the Koch Brothers, or the dozens of other billionaires who have joined hand in hand to establish the durable top-down political infrastructure of the GOP. If a politician or pundit just plays along with these people, if you stay loyal to the cause even in the most tortured argument, you will be a made man. There are thousands of positions held open at endowed economics departments, think tanks, lobbying firms, and captive media to reward people who fight the good fight for the right. Lose an election? There is always the possibility of another campaign in another district. Conversely there is a constant threat of well-funded primary campaigns against anyone who doesn't toe the line and kiss the ring.
The Democrats have no such leverage. Their operational interests conflict with the interests of their political base. They mostly seem to come into politics poisoned by Mr Smith Goes to Washington, or The West Wing, and then the people who survive are the ones with more ambition than ideology who do whatever they need to do to ensure incumbency. Their institutional infrastructure seems to be ~five lobbying firms whose only apparent purpose is punching left when their base comes into conflict with corporate donors, and skimming off the top. The only time you will see money weaponized in a meaningful way is to fight against a primary challenge from the left, to include running independents against the primary winner in eg NYC's 2025 mayoral. So goes the "big tent" party.
But if by chance an angry left-wing billionaire spontaneously occurred (let's say the Trump vs Musk relationship went down a little differently)... There are tortious weapons sitting on the table unused, which could be put into effect dismantling this flavor of "journalism". As long as red America is being fed cradle-to-grave, violently ethnonationalist propaganda we're going to have a tough time persuading them out of their worldview.
The story wasn't sketchy. Rather's claims about GWB's service were correct and well documented ... it was only the Killian memo that was apparently inauthentic ... but it may well have been transcribed using later technology.
That was the beauty of it -- it changed the story from the known facts about Bush into Rather using forged documents. It was a very clever trick, I'll give him that.
Yes, very Rovian. Of course Rather and CBS can be faulted for not doing due diligence, but this is how the right uses incidental mistakes to obscure the facts.
> To make their product, the food company’s scientists collect living cells from Pacific salmon and grow them in cell cultivators that mimic the inside of a wild fish—controlling factors like temperature, pH and nutrients, per their website. After harvesting them, the team incorporates plant-based ingredients to make the hunk of cells taste, feel and look like salmon fillets.
So... Like a wild fish, but with NO IMMUNE SYSTEM WHATSOEVER, which requires your sterilization protocols to be effectively perfect.
NASA has tried and failed to get their sterilization protocols to perfection levels for Mars landers, and consistently failed despite using basically zero organic materials.
We're going to cook this stuff, yes, sure (aren't we?)... but the squick is rational. And the problem gets inherently worse at larger scale production.
The lack of an immune system is not a health and safety risk, it's a business risk. An infected batch won't get served to humans it will just die/fail and need to be thrown out. Fighting infection is one of the reasons that lab-grown meats are so expensive. I have seen reasonably convincing technical analyses which claim that it would require pretty massive technological innovations (that are not anywhere on the horizon so far) to make any lab-grown meats economically viable. That's very likely the reason for the fact that (as pointed out in another comment), this is not pure salmon, it's salmon mixed with vegetable product. That was almost definitely a cost-saving measure.
My personal guess is that the first actually economically viable lab-grown meats will be of endangered/extinct animals that the extremely wealthy will be willing to pay the exorbitant costs that it takes to create them for the novelty factor.
There are very likely degrees of infection which are not obviously spoiled, but which have health consequences if consumed. The locus at which the antibiotic/etc protocols are mostly but not entirely effective.
If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?
Can you explain why this situation is any different than regular meat? I.e. Fish immune systems don’t stop parasites from being present in the meat, flash freezing is what kills the parasites.
Parasitic worms are huge, complex multicellular animals that co-evolved to sometimes survive the immune system response to their presence; Freezing kills them because they are huge and the scale of ice crystals severs important body parts. Living bacteria, living fungi, spores from these, viruses, and importantly heat-resistant toxins produced by these, are what I'm worried about.
One of modern humanity's oldest activities is fermenting carbohydrates in large bioreactors into alcohol, yogurt, and pickles, but there are a lot of things that turned out not to work in that history.
When we try to fabricate, say, monoclonal antibodies using large cultures of multicellular tissues for pharmaceutical work, the price ends up coming out to millions of dollars a kilogram.
I am implicitly skeptical of the protocols of a protein tissue culture that has to be produced at the ~$30/kg price level.
Could you eat it and not die? I'm sure!
But could you feed people with a billion meals worth of batches and have nobody die? I'm less sure! My understanding is that tissue culture failures are frequently the bane of a biologist's research program.
This obviously varies by animal, but some meats are safe to eat raw or undercooked if the animal was healthy because the meat doesn't have lots of pathogens inside it. Flash freezing won't kill bacteria or viruses that the immune system of an animal might.
Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive. They're literally swimming through a soup of arthropods, plankton, algae, bacteria, and viruses that would love nothing more to turn their meat into more of themselves. There's always a bigger fish that is trying to eat them, yes, but the smaller critters want to eat as well!
Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.
This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
> Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive.
Ah, good news for you then! Fish immune system most definitely does NOT stop parasites. Every (and I mean it, every) salmon you've ever eaten had some parts of parasites in them.
That's also why you absolutely should NOT eat fresh-caught salmon without thoroughly cooking it. Industrially-caught salmon is always frozen, and it kills parasites.
These fish grew large enough for humans to eye as food, because parasites were effectively limited by the immune system from devouring the entire fish. It's not perfectly effective, but it doesn't need to be.
Because from a quick search this isn't what people refer to when they think of lab-grown meat/fish. This is some mix of stuff that includes some amount of material that is lab-grown. It won't behave like you expect Salmon to.
You're describing the sterilization process that's necessary for cheese production, it's crazy intense, but it's also a known quantity that we've been successfully doing for years and years and years. Listeria is no joke. I wouldn't worry about this any more than you worry about our other food you find at the grocery store.
No, not really, because the parent comment is freaking out about a problem that doesn't exist.
It's not going to be possible to grow a thing that looks like a piece of salmon but is secretly riddled with viruses and bacteria.
Either the lab gets their sterile technique right and they wind up with something that looks like salmon, or they get it wrong and you wind up with bacteria slop. Things that look like salmon can only become so if no bacteria and viruses are present.
In the real world I don't think you'll find salmon that don't have bacteria and viruses (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43345-x shows both "good" and "bad" bacteria and certainly many salmon are infected with a range of viruses (not sure if there are any "good" viral infections, but some are not fatal).
A fair point, but wouldn't it only become unrecognizable at levels that mean you're effectively eating pus instead of salmon? My understanding is that the effective innoculation needed to give botulism to a human baby (who has an immune system, just less of one than we do) is <100 spores, which is picograms.
There's just such a gulf between the prices at which this is feasible for food use, and the prices at which existing large bioreactors can culture animal tissue.
If we can't even get plant slop ("algal biodiesel") culture consistent and cheap enough to burn in an engine, or get plant slop ("tilapia feedstock algae") cheap enough to industrialize to outcompete chickens... I don't know that I'm comfortable eating bioreactor meat that can only survive in the FDA danger zone.
Living animals with immune systems are the only types of organisms which can effectively host pathogens such that they can be communicated. Even your example belies the problem: pus is produced by the immune system destroying bacteria, it isn't a bacterial colony itself.
In an a bioreactor where no immune system exists, there can't be a latent infection: there's no immune system! If it can infect and destroy what's growing, then it'll infect and destroy all of it. It isn't going to look like tuna meat after that.
Isn't it possible for the pathogen to be limited by accumulation of its own waste products or depletion of specific nutrients before it destroys the whole sample, or for the meat to be harvested before the pathogen has finished propagating?
What? The requirements for this are nothing like what is required for sterilization of a Mars rover. NASA's goal is to not have a single iota of foreign organic material on rovers, which is obviously not even close to what is required here. The only thing you need to worry about with this stuff is whether there are any dangerous bacterium in it (e.g. salmonella), which can be readily monitored and avoided without herculean effort. And unlike real salmon, parasites and viruses won't have much opportunity to gain a foothold.
It has been obvious that we were supposed to be sandboxing these browser sessions in the OS and sandboxing these Google Accounts in basic internet opsec. Being able to create and discard these identities at will is the only sensible, resilient way to function.
Google has actively fought against this, and many people haven't noticed. Things like requiring 2FA for new Google account activation are ridiculously destructive to the ability to maintain any privacy or security. My workplace started demanding 2FA phone/email activation and their response to "So give us a workplace email account then, I'm not using my personal phone" was literally "Just go create a free GMail", which isn't a thing any more without a personal phone.
And it goes beyond new accounts.
I have a 2006-vintage, realname, first.last@gmail.com forwarding account for formal uses that I can't access any more DESPITE HAVING THE PASSWORD AND CONTROL OF THE RECOVERY EMAIL because I refused to hook up 2FA, and moved from the old PC to the new PC which Google doesn't recognize session cookies on. Give Google the keys to the castle or fuck you, we're walling up the doors.
These are dark patterns that, if Google is going to fight us on, demand regulation. Consistent access to specific email & phone numbers were never supposed to be this important to a functioning life, and not supposed to provide a shady for-profit private entity with a permanent panopticon dossier on your activities either. We would flip the table and replace governments if they tried to do this to us. We have, in some cases.
Burn it all down and create some kind of nonprofit NGO to run email or to run the Google Empire, which needs to be simultaneously secure and feasibly pseudonymous in order for people to continue having the basic human rights they enjoyed in the 2010's and 2000's when Google was still in the "Be Less Evil" phase.
345 feet there, wait for the light to change to pedestrian crossing, watch both ways ANYWAY because pedestrian crossings are not going to be exclusive use at an intersection like this, then 345' back, adds up to five to ten minutes.
I was always warned away from them because who knows who might be inside. There were some legitimate issues with the lack of any eyes on these spaces permitting mildly antisocial behavior, and some illegitimate issues with every other made-for-TV crime movie featuring a rape or murder in them; The "back alleys" of suburbia.
I can cherish the research path and value the intended endpoint, but knowing what I know of agribusiness, early approval to market seems a mite reckless. Particularly in 2025. Particularly with "sushi-grade fish".
We produce millions of tons of affordable meat from industrial production of animals THAT HAVE immune systems, swimming in antibiotics, that the FDA tells you to cook thoroughly because it's definitely full of salmonella. We chop it up using child labor on production lines that would make you a vegetarian if you saw them.