well, there goes my hope for lab-grown meat

I at least somewhat buy into the idea of ethically sourced meat, and for the moment, the theoretical pinnacle is so-called "lab-grown meat"—meat literally cultured and grown in a lab, turning the production of meat into something akin to plant farming: start the culture, grow, then harvest. In my head, I imagine a lab that resembles a hydroponic farm.

Lab-grown meat is a charming idea, and even the US-Brit founder and head of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, has said she'd back lab-grown efforts because they'd be cruelty-free (old article here, which talks about chicken meat; the million-dollar prize referred to in the article has since been rescinded—see here). Research on lab-grown meat has been ongoing for a while, now—since about the 1990s, so the field has a history. I had no idea what the state of the art was, but a recent bit of news has turned me off from the field.

According to this Substack article, many labs use what are called "immortalized" cells, and if you've ever done any research on cancer, then you know that cancer cells are considered effectively immortal: one of the things that makes cancer so scary is how cancer cells continue to grow so robustly and relentlessly. The article points out that the "immortalized" cells involved in meat-growing are technically pre-cancerous, but the article also notes that the leap from pre-cancerous to cancerous is a small one. The article quotes sources who reassure us that, even if we did think of lab-grown meat as cancerous, the cells come from a completely different species of animal, making it impossible for human consumers of lab-grown flesh to get cancer themselves. That sounds reasonable, but the thought of chowing down on a tumor isn't exactly appetizing.

This news could be devastating for the lab-grown-meat industry. The optics are horrible even if the meat really is perfectly safe for consumption. I hope researchers turn away from this line of research to find more wholesome ways of growing meat. We've had progress in related areas of research, e.g., growing earlobes by covering a nutrient-filled, sculpted-polymer lattice with stem cells. I don't recall ever hearing about how these earlobes contain immortalized cells, so maybe something along those lines can be done to construct artificial steaks (without the polymers, of course). The question then becomes how you grow different "cuts" of meat from whatever animal it is you're simulating.