A piece of good news reported by Science and Technology Daily last week is very sci-fi and involves biosynthesis technology. However, this lofty achievement almost made people vomit psychologically and physically.
Here's how it was reported:
Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, June 23 -- "Chicken rice and pork rice are a combination of cell-cultured meat and rice, millet and purple rice. It is mainly to use the characteristics of chicken, pig muscle and chicken and pig adipocytes to grow adherently, and use rice, millet and purple rice as scaffolds after pretreatment to provide a microenvironment for the growth of pig and chicken cells, so that the cells can proliferate and differentiate on their surfaces, and finally form a combination of balanced nutrition and controllable composition. The above is the latest scientific and technological achievements launched by a comprehensive research center for meat food and a food science research institute.
The "food of the future" that these "food" scientists have launched is not a food in the traditional sense. I myself have a lot of experience with traditional food, and there are only a few people in China who have never done farm work, and I belong to the majority. Since ancient times, in tens of thousands of years, people and crops have coexisted, and through natural and artificial breeding, today's food crops have been created.
In China alone, rice, millet, millet, soybeans, buckwheat, supplemented by chestnuts, cabbage, lychees, dates, longan native fruits and vegetables, and grapes, alfalfa, cucumbers, garlic, carrots, broad beans, lettuce introduced in the Han Dynasty, Champa rice introduced in the Song Dynasty, corn, artichoke, pumpkin, watermelon, peanuts, sunflowers, peppers, tomatoes, bananas, plantain taro, sweet potatoes, and hybrid rice, hybrid corn, hybrid wheat, and seawater rice developed by modern Chinese agricultural scientists, these are the products since ancient times. The rice bowl that is really in the hands of the Chinese themselves today is, and in the foreseeable future, it will still be.
On top of food crops, humans and domestic animals develop symbiotic relationships, even involving spiritual pet relationships. There are six kinds of domestic animals fed by humans: horses, cattle, sheep, chickens, dogs, pigs, and in a broad sense, ducks and geese. Pigs, dogs, and chickens are omnivores, like humans, and are particularly prone to intimate relationships with humans. Their domestication is roughly synchronized with the self-domestication of humans, that is, humans complete their self-domestication in the process of domesticating them. Humans make full use of animals to improve their own survival while helping them survive, from which they gain auxiliary power and sufficient animal protein nutrition.
As human beings, we have never regarded individual domestic animals as useful parts and useless parts, and have always used overall praise words such as "the whole body of a pig is a treasure", which is the value that human nature should have. On the other hand, in the modern food industry, KFC's fast-growing white feather chicken, bodybuilding pigs, and ractopamine beef, which have never seen the sun, have emerged such opportunistic "ingredients". It was research in the field of metabolism that led to the technology to produce these gadgets; It's funny and dangerous that research for the benefit of humanity is used in technologies that harm health.
The next level of research, similar to tissue culture, cell culture, differentiation regulation, stem cell differentiation, applied to breeding, initially started with the cloning of sheep, the British cloned sheep Dolly was born in 1996 and stayed at the Rosslyn Institute all his life. She does not have a father, but has three mothers, one who provides DNA, another who provides eggs, and one who is in charge of surrogacy. In 2003, Dolly died of lung disease. Sheep usually live for about 12 years, and Dolly only lived to be 6 years old, having experienced arthritis and lung infections typical of older sheep before dying. Whether cloning technology provides eternal youth or direct access to middle and old age is still a suspense in the scientific community.
Dolly the Sheep
Animal cloning experiments have a high failure rate, and behind a success is countless failures. Among them, the communication between animals and people is also a factor.
The issue of human cloning must be mentioned here, and the biggest limitation of human cloning is ethics and law, and there are no technical limitations. This technique is actually less difficult than animals: pregnant women are much easier to communicate with than animals. Criminal Law Article 336: Where gene-edited or cloned human embryos are implanted into human bodies or animals, or gene-edited or cloned animal embryos are implanted into human bodies, and the circumstances are serious, a sentence of up to three years imprisonment or short-term detention is to be given, and a concurrent fine; where the circumstances are especially serious, the sentence is between three and seven years imprisonment and a concurrent fine. This law should be placed in the professional classroom of the university, after all, it belongs to the field that outsiders cannot touch.
Purely technically, modern genetic engineering, cloning technology, stem cell transplantation, etc., are in a breakthrough period. Without these technologies, humans would be helpless in the face of cancer, genetic defects, plagues, etc. The vaccines approved for use during the new crown period include 2 inactivated vaccines of Sinopharm, Sinovac inactivated vaccine, adenovirus vector vaccine developed by CanSino, inactivated vaccine developed by Kangtai Biologics, recombinant protein vaccine developed by Zhifei Biologics, and inactivated vaccines developed by the Institute of Biology of the Academy of Medical Sciences. These domestic vaccines are used on a large scale, and they are overpowered by the German biotechnology company BIONTEC in terms of technology. The mRNA vaccine developed by Biontec is of breakthrough significance: it can preset mutation sites according to the direction of virus mutation revealed by big data, and ambush the mutation of the virus in advance. Compared with traditional vaccines and recombinant protein vaccines, mRNA vaccines as a whole are a new generation. The 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine is awarded to two pioneers and founders in the field of mRNA: Catalin Kaliko and Drew Weissman.
Catalin Kaliko and Drew Weissman
But from a socio-ethical point of view, biotechnology still needs to be kept in a cage. Stephen Hawking also said in his posthumous work "Big Questions and Answers" that the law can prohibit humans from editing genes, but human nature cannot resist temptation. Wealthy people will improve their own genes and those of their children to create smarter and longer-lived "superhumans." Musk believes that if society is only prolonging the lives of the elderly and does not effectively solve the problems of old age such as dementia and physical decline, then this will require a lot of resources from society and may lead to "social suffocation". In his view, excessive prolongation of life would hinder progress by holding society to obscurity by trapping it with outdated ideas. The smartest and the smartest and richest people must have a point.
Elon Musk: Excessive prolongation of life can make society shackled by outdated ideas
Going back to the "pork rice" and "chicken rice" at the beginning of the article, the technology actually used is cell culture, which is cell culture with a microcarrier skeleton. This is a conventional cell culture operation that does not have a high technological content, but these two words break through the psychological endurance.
First of all, this "pork rice" is not "rice meat", the latter is a very disgusting thing, and this word makes it difficult not to have bad associations. The good news is that this kind of thing has now been eliminated in all formal wet markets.
Again, the "product" that comes out of the laboratory should not be "food". Anyone who has experience in the laboratory knows that there should be no eating behavior in the laboratory, especially in the biological laboratory. What can produce "food" should be workshops and production lines that meet GMP and food production standards.
In addition, there is another question, can this kind of "scientific and technological achievement" be transformed? Is there a market? Is it cost-effective? If none of this is needed, then where is the direction of R&D? Especially when it comes to cell culture, expensive serum is generally used, and only serum-free culture is suitable for large-scale culture requirements. In short, the cost is super high, and most people don't even think about it, and they can't afford it at all.
Spend money on water
In the face of this "food of the future", people who know how to do it not feel that the future is promising, but they are terrified, and feel like a poor man entering a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Let's take a look at their propaganda, and if different voices are allowed, I will contribute two words:.
"Cell-cultured meat technology is not only a food safety issue, but also the answer to the problem of food personalization and customization in the future."
"At a time when the aging population is intensifying and nutritional and health issues are being paid much attention to, the customized characteristics of the nutritional value of meat cultivation technology will usher in a broader market space."
"In the context of continuous fermentation of global issues such as resource shortage and climate change, the position and role of cultivated meat technology in the global food supply system as a highly sustainable food production method will gradually become prominent."
People with experience in the laboratory instinctively have to make a strict distinction between the two concepts of laboratory samples and food. In mammalian cell cultures, in particular, antibiotics are needed to prevent contamination, and in this regard, these samples can never be considered the "food of the future".
In order to achieve the stability of the cell line and avoid the instability of the passage number, the "immortal" cell line, that is, the transformed cell line, is generally used. When it comes to this, professionals will never use these cells themselves as "food", but use them to extract and purify cell products.
Many people think that this special "food" is to meet the special needs of the future, so there is a reason for existence. In fact, according to the physiological characteristics of people in different periods, coarse tea and light rice, balanced nutrition, active exercise, adequate rest, and maintaining a reasonable metabolic rate are the foundation of physical and mental health. In terms of choosing food, whole grains are better than delicacies from the mountains and seas, and coarse tea and light rice are better than ginseng. No matter how ridiculous the "personalized food" is, it is impossible to jump out of this law.
The research samples in the laboratory are high-sounding as "future food", don't be a job title.
As for the development of new animal proteins, there are two recognized successes, both of which are very good: the Feed Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences has efficiently produced ethanol and ethanol Clostridium protein with carbon monoxide in industrial exhaust gas and ammonia as nitrogen source, realizing the transformation of inorganic matter into organic matter in one step, realizing the industrial production capacity of 10,000 tons, and obtaining China's first new feed raw material product certificate.
The other is edible insects, with more than 3,000 species of insects to choose from, which can be eaten and used medicinally. On the Internet, cicada farmers sell golden cicadas through live broadcast platforms, indicating that the wild ones have long been insufficient to eat.
Fried grasshoppers
Fried bamboo worms
This article is the first publication of the original headline, and plagiarism must be investigated.
The material comes from the Internet.