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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain the significance of your statement?

Surely the meat we all eat is dead along with the immune system and then cooked.

IDK what they're talking about but I could imagine a pathogen that evolved on real animals having a field day at a meat farm without an immune system to fight back it would be reliant on the human operators cleanliness and other procedures.

Granted it might be much harder to have the initial infection happen in the first place since it's just a chunk of meat in a lab (no animal to walk around and get injured or otherwise interact with the environment, no poop, no lungs etc).

It will be interesting to see this technology develop.

That's not that much different from existing industrial environments like brewing, or making mayonnaise or other things. I don't think that's much of a hurdle to have to overcome.

Mayonnaise as an example is interesting, although the time that the mayonnaise exists for is probably shorter than meat.

With beer and other fermented stuff, the fermentation is a disinfecting process. For example people used to make really weak beer to drink instead of potentially drinking dirty water with something in it that would make you sick.

I'm talking about while you are growing the meat, whether it be in a natural system that is self-regulating and with an immune system, or in a vat where any contamination will spread rampantly. That's one of the biggest problems with lab-grown meat: if you make it at a scale that is economically feasible, the chance for contamination is so high that very few batches will make it through the process, and will have to be discarded instead.

Can't we solve this at least temporarily with a sodium rich environment? It seems to be effective for safe fermentation. I have no idea whether the biochemical reactions necessary to produce the meat though would be inhibited if we did this.

Try injecting yourself with saltwater and see what happens. The osmotic effects won't just affect the undesired cells. It will also affect the desired cells.

If I've learned anything from Bell Labs and Frank Capra, it's that blood is pretty similar to seawater.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=08QDu2pGtkc

We do large batch cheeses and beers and other things like that; which are similar enough that they'll offer useful pointers. "Meat" cultures might well be more subject to contamination because of the conditions required, but still. It's not a new problems and there's solutions that have worked for similar cases.

I do not think they will be able to compete economically with the backyard chicken, for example; but I'm not worried that they can't produce a safe product.

Those are much simpler yeasts and molds being cultivated. Meat cells are much more complex from an inputs/outputs point of view, and much more prone to contamination, especially at scales that are economically feasible.

Maybe they'll do it mostly robotically in a clean room type environment, with UVC blasting everything other than the actual growth medium.

I'm not an expert but it might be that the cultures we have chosen for beer and cheese and so on are those that outcompete most others while still not being harmful in by-products to us. This might take a while for lab grown meat.

Animals are deuterstomes, meaning there is a nonsterile side, which is the skin and everything between the mouth and anus. Then there is the inside, which is sterile and protected by the immune system. If your blood or muscle tissue has bacteria, you are headed for a septic death or gangrene.

If I had to opine, I would say an immune system would attack foreign antigens and anything that needs to be eliminated while the animal was alive so the meat would be… healthier?

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