Talk:In vitro meat
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
gooooodness. I hope some reasons against will be added here :-)))
- Done. -- Astudent 04:17 May 1, 2003 (UTC)
1.3 Economy In vitro meat may be more efficient economically and environmentally
I think this deserve a little bit more explanation. What does "may" mean here ? Do you have some references supporting the fact it might be more interesting from an economical point of view in particular ? User:Anthere
- I used "may" throughout the article because very little research has been done in this area, and perhaps this will encourage researchers to look into these areas and change "may" to "is" or "is not". -- Astudent 01:45 May 2, 2003 (UTC)
Apologies, but I think it is not a valid answer. Let me give you an example
currently, 1.3 is put in the "reasons for", right ?
Don't you think we could similarily put in "reasons against" ?
1.3 Economy In vitro meat may be less efficient economically and environmentally
Why not ? We could just as well. We could add it in the article, and perhaps it will encourage researchers to look into the areas and change "may" by it not. Till then, this statement is maybe true, maybe false, and there is nothing supporting it being a "reason for".
What are the arguments for stating it might be environmentally less efficient ?
What are the arguments for stating it might be economically less efficient ?
- That is a good point. Maybe we could have sections "Reasons for", "Reasons against", "Other factors" and put "Economy" in "Other factors".
- Or we could just repeat "Economy" in both "Reasons for" and "Reasons against".
- Feel free to add and edit reasons. -Astudent
[edit] Change of title from "in vitro meat" to "artificial meat"
Hi, thanks for your comments.
My opinion is that the term "artificial meat" could make people confused as to whether the meat itself is artificial (ie. chemicals mixed together to make a meat-like substance) or whether the production environment is artificial (ie. test tubes, petri dishes, tanks) but where the meat is still animal tissue.
I also eliminated "lab-grown meat" as the title because this process will eventually move out of the laboratory and into the farm/factory.
"In vitro meat" sounds weird but it is more accurate. In vitro is also used for in vitro fertilization, in vitro organ, in vitro toxicology, in vitro diagnostics etc.
Sorry to be so fussy but I think it's important. What do other people think? -- Astudent 02:07 May 2, 2003 (UTC)
- My move was predicated on the desire that wikipedia articles use the same terminology as the world at large, and that "in vitro meat" doesn't meet that standard. We do have a general guideline that says we should call things what they are most commonly known as. Although "in vitro meat" may be a somewhat accurate description, it isn't what the researchers are calling what they are working on.
- There is still the problem that the researchers themselves haven't settled on a single name, so picking the "most common" is difficult. There are several good alternatives being used though, including:
-
- artificial meat
- synthetic meat
- engineered meat
- artificial tissue
- synthetic tissue
- engineered tissue
- laboratory meat
- lab-grown meat
- A problem with the "tissue" names are that they include tissue being created for medical as well as edible purposes, and that isn't what this article is about. A good question though, is should the two be covered in the same article? If the same process (someday) can create a muscle for both implantion and digestion, then why would we define them differently?
- Anyhow, how do the other names above strike you? -º¡º
-
- Thanks for the post.
-
- I have to admit that "in vitro meat" is not used very much, so it shouldn't be the title. Perhaps it can still be included in the body of the article as a possible name.
-
- From a brief Google search, it seems that "laboratory meat" or "lab-grown meat" is used by New Scientist. All of your suggestions are good ones. I would write something like "artificially-grown meat" just to emphasise that the production is artificial but the meat is (almost) natural. Anyway, I think we'll keep "artificial meat" as the name until the researchers agree on something.
-
- You raised a good point about muscle tissue and transplant organs. We can combine the two articles in the (near?) future, but at the moment there's too much difference. -Astudent
-
-
- We could put a list of all possible names in the article, perhaps at the bottom. And maybe a sentence describing "in vitro" vs "in vivo" would not be out of place as well. After reading (and thinking) more, I'm leaning towards another move, to synthetic meat. Synthetic is the word more precisely used to describe something that is different because of the means of production, and not because the end product is "different"... -º¡º
-
-
-
-
- "Synthetic" is a good word, but unfortunately the original problem of uncommon usage remains. I'll put it in the list, though. -Astudent
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Since synthetic/artificial meat is most commonly understood to refer to imitation meat products (e.g. textured vegetable protein), how about we move the article back to its original, unambiguous title while the discussion of alternatives continues. Mkweise 08:42 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
-
-
-
At present, scientists are experimentally growing artificial meat in laboratories, but if the process is successful, and the product passes safety and health trials, meat may soon be grown in farms for public consumption
This is unclear. Either the meat is grown in farms and it will be natural meat, either the meat is grown in laboratories, and it will be artificial meat. I doubt *very much* farms will install laboratories, , and hire technicians to grow artificial meat. This in particular as animal cells are quite fragile, and needs a very carefully controlled environment. Plus very strict safety rules. And as far as I know, the day has not come when we call a farm a lab growing cells.
- I meant that laboratories are places for experiments, and factories/farms are places for mass-producing the product. Science:Laboratory as Technology:Factory/Farm although sometimes the distinction is not clear cut. -Astudent
Just for the record, people, the em dashes were in the correct form in the first place. Parenthesis are OK, but inferior in this usage. There are several ways to make an em dash:
- (i) xxx-yyy or xxx - yyy (the minus key) is just plain wrong, it is a completely different character that just haqqens to look adit like an em dash. See what haqqens when I bo a similar sort of violence to the language by swapping the letters "p and "q" and "d" and "b" around? It remains reabadle, but it's ugly and incorrect. A bash is not a hyqhen, still less a minus sign,
- (ii) xxx--yyy or xxx -- yyy (two minus signs) Just as wrong, possibly even uglier. The only time you do this is when you have a steam-driven manual typewriter. It's more common in tthe US than in the rest of the world, apparently, but in neither place is it correct English.
- (iii) xxx—yyy (—) Correct. Professionally printed works always use this symbol, never substitute anything else for it, it's easy to type, and easy to remember. The only problem with — is that some older browesers do not understand it.
- (iv) xxx—yyy (—) Correct. The exact same em dash as in example (iii) above, but coded in a different way, that is more compatible with older browsers. This is hard to remember and awkward to type, but produces the correct result in almost all circumstances. Tannin 08:04 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
- Well...as much as I hate to participate in the rampant overuse of parentheses, after having my —es replaced by --s for the second time, it seemed like an acceptable compromise. Mkweise 08:42 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
- Wikipedia is not a professional printed work. As I already pointed out to Mkweise, we need to avoid user astonishment with unnecessary markup in the wiki source text. HTML tables are bad enough, entities should be avoided whenever possible. We have thousands of "--"s on Wikipedia. These will all be rendered as nice looking mdashes if the software ever gets upgraded to that purpose. On the other hand, HTML mdashes will have to be converted manually to "--"s to make use of that feature. The disadvantages of having an ugly &— in the source far outweigh the miniscule advantage of having a nicer looking (in some browsers, with some fonts) dash. --Eloquence 08:45 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
-
- While in general I think I agree with you, though I'm pretty ambivalent, why would you think they'd have to be manually converted? -- John Owens 09:00 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
-
-
- Depends on what you or I mean by manually. At the very least, someone would have to run an SQL query on hundreds of megs of text from the CUR table. Not nice. --Eloquence
-
Tannin, there is actually one more option you neglected to mention:
- (v) In Windows, ALT-0151 will put the actual '—' character into the wiki text, or you can simply copy-and-paste a rendered &mdash. Not sure whether this works with all browsers on all OSs, though.
Mkweise 22:15 May 8, 2003 (UTC)
Uhh, regarding the title "In vitro meat" .. please think of the connotations: "in vitro fertilization" -- "in vitro meat". This is not a nice mental picture. --Eloquence
- In vitro just means "outside the living body and in an artificial environment". "In vitro fertilization" is by far the most popular use of the term, but not the only one. There's in vitro toxicology (very important for non-animal testing of cosmetics and chemicals) and others. -Astudent
-
- or just in vitro culture, which plant breeders use a lot now as a technique. It was used in particular to restore some species which were widely diseased by virus (the whole plant was contaminated by some virus, except for a couple of location such as anthere and pollen grain, virus free. The antheres holding the pollen were in vitro cultured and some plants were able to regenerate without any contamination, from the anthere/pollen ). This was definitly a very important success in plant breeding, and gave in vitro culture an important credential. Ant
"Backing off KF's change: Soylent Green and the Shmoos are related fictional foods, but not examples of in-vitro meat."
--> Could you explain this? --KF 14:09 18 May 2003 (UTC)
Soylent Green was recycled human flesh. The Shmoos were artificial animals designed to provide meat, eggs, milk, all at once: a bit like Larry Niven's Bandersnatchi. Both are linked from here as other examples of "other fictional weird meat-type foods".
The claim that tissue culture "...does not directly involve animals except for the initial removal of cells," is deceptive, as it typically requires 10-20% fetal calf or (veal) calf serum in the medium. Don't be fooled by the figure of 10-20%, either, as the amount of medium is usually 100-fold greater than the amount of cells in a dish or flask. The medium is changed every 1-3 days. Whoever wrote that should read a few papers from the primary literature involving cell culture before making such a bogus claim. I switched culture conditions to the other column where they belong.
To put it more succinctly:
1) "In vitro" does not mean that animals are not used. Animals are routinely vivisected to provide reagents used in such procedures, such as antibodies. 2) The source of the cells is insignificant relative to the source of medium supplements as an animal welfare concern. 3) The elimination of animals as experimental/technological subjects in no way implies that they are not still intensively exploited as mere tools.
I do cell and tissue culture every day, and I am disgusted by dishonest and/or ignorant people who falsely portray it as "non-animal" and "alternative." It is neither--none of the experiments I do on cultured cells can be done on whole animals. Moving the exploitation of animals off-site is a purely esthetic matter--ethically speaking, it is a false choice, or even an inferior one, since I have no idea how the pregnant cows and veal calves from whom I eventually get serum are treated. When I work with the animals myself, at least I can be sure that they are treated humanely.
-John
Can someone please elaborate on this sentence in procedure: A matrix of collagen is seeded with muscle cells, which are then bathed in a nutritious solution and induced to divide.
I'd really like to understand what kind of solution that is and how u induce a cell to divide (and later, how do u stop it to divide) - thanks. User:Mjanich
- The solution contains (as a major and essential component) fetal bovine serum, which is serum from a cow fetus (foetus). AFAIK there is no totally "synthetic" growth medium for this kind of meat, as the exact conditions haven't been comprehensively described yet. All the speculation regarding reduced environmental impact is based on the assumption that a totally "synthetic" growth medium can be produced with less environmental harm than the bovine equivalent. The current state of the art would be thousands if not millions of times more wasteful than the current biological system (cattle and grass or grains).
- I'd also like to point out that the "exemption" from growth hormones and antibiotics is misleading, as almost all the hormones involved would be added from an external source, and the addition of antibiotics is practically required to reduce the disastrous effects of accidental contamination in a tissue culture which hasn't got its own immune system. This "exemption" basically means that ingredients which were once unnecessary has become an essential part of the meat-production process.
- -Jimworm
[edit] Fiction section
I remember a science-fiction short story set in the future, where vat-meat has become the norm, about a congressional investigation into a company that (it is dramatically revealed at the end of the story) has just introduced cultured human meat, with the person speaking spelling out the no longer familiar word, "C-A-N-N-I-B-A-L-I-S-M". Does anyone remember the name and/or author of this story? --Clement Cherlin 23:52, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
- That'd be Arthur C. Clarke. :) — Xaonon (Talk) 06:56, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Defining In Vitro
This article uses the term 'in vitro' almost every sentence with it in italics (hinting that in vitro is a phrase/common term). It may be worthwhile to explain that 'in vitro' is latin for, or at least link to the article in vitro. I don't want to make this change if the meaning is different to the page in vitro...should I change it? ny156uk 20:01, 31 January 2007 (UTC)
