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Tl;dw:
- Lab meat works in small (2L tanks), but doesn’t scale in big tanks (which is needed to get cheaper than 50$ per chicken nugget)
- (The whole video is basically detailing why; contamination ruins the batch, continuously replacing the immune system is extremely expensive, every attempt and breakthrough has worked in small tanks but not big ones)
- People in the industry know this, but investor money is $$$
Most tech is expensive when new. Prices usually come down as it ages into the market.
Are any of these points unsolvable engineering problems?
The main issue is that the approach is too naive. Organic tissue has blood vessels that bring nutrients and oxygen to the cells while removing waste. This is what allows tissue to grow in three dimensions. When you just have a bunch of cells in a vat, then cells in the middle of the mass have no way to get nutrients or dispose of waste. The other big problem is the lack of an immune system, so any contaminant can quickly grow in this substrate.
A better approach could be to try growing a more complex organic system that includes muscle tissue and maybe even organs such as heart and kidneys. I imagine this is a solvable problem, but it might not be the best approach.
A different approach I saw was to modify plants to produce meat like tissue. People have been playing around with this approach as seen here. That seems a lot more promising to me because growing plants is a lot easier than trying to culture cells in a vat.
Are any of these points unsolvable engineering problems?
Currently, yes.
@OsrsNeedsF2P @thevoiceofra That might work, depends on the details. Specifically how much of that 50$ is RnD they haven’t written off as a loss yet.
If they can sell a DIY kit and the ingredients, we could do the same thing for lab meat that we do for IPAs and coffee roasting?
After watching the video, it sounds like that won’t be happening. Too complex and specialized to do at home. Sounds like lots of filtration, chemistry problems.
- Lab meat works in small (2L tanks), but doesn’t scale in big tanks (which is needed to get cheaper than 50$ per chicken nugget)
I’ll be sticking with the tofu and stuff I’ve been surviving on for the last 30+ years.
