this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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I disagree with that statement generally, but anyway, you can't catch cancer. You can catch a disease that causes cancer, but eating cancer itself wouldn't give you cancer. You can however catch prion disease... And these can live in real flesh/meat you get from a shop.
Also, there will be ground up cancer in processed meat. I guarantee it. You don't think farm animals get cancer?
Transmissible cancers do exist in animal kingdom. (Tasmanian devils for example). So caution is justified.
However, as far as I know, synthetic meat would be made out of muscle cells which are not immortalized.
Transmissible cancer
Christ. New horrors beyond my imagination.
Still, my point stands that there are already risks to animal agriculture. Tasmanian devil cancers don't make this a no go IMO.
(I am aware that's not what you are suggesting)
I would imagine synthetic meat would be strictly regulated anyway. According to the article OP linked, there's only two companies in the US that have been approved to make synthetic meat.
Yup, Tasmanian Devil facial tumor disease is indeed pretty graphic.
It should be noted however that the transmission is limited to within a single species, which recently went through a population bottleneck that resulted in their immune systems having difficulty telling each other's cells apart. Something like a bovine-to-human transmissible cancer would be orders of magnitude more unlikely.
Wouldn't the end goal be to create immortal cell lines for the various cuts of meat? Otherwise, we need to keep (albeit much smaller) populations of livestock around to continually harvest new cells from.
I am not so into synthetic meat ;-) So this is all speculation from my side. You can grow these cells for many cell divisions just not forever. So you keep a master stock of an early generation in the deep freezer (maybe 1000 vials). Then thaw one vial and expand the cells. Maybe you create a secondary derived stock. If they are old, thaw a fresh vial etc. If the/master stock is used up. Then you need to generate a new one.
P.s. regarding the transmissible cancer cells. I don't think it would happen likely. I think the cells need to loose the MHC gene/protein for this. Just wanted to tell that it exists.
P.p.s I would be much more worried by viruses/ mycoplasma unknowingly infecting the cell culture. On the other hand farm animals are sick all the time too.