[gamblor956]

No, it fundamentally boiled down to two things: bovine serum costs, and hygiene costs.

GOOD claims that it already produces cultured meat without using bovine serum, in their Singapore facility. As we have no details on what they use instead of bovine serum, it's hard to assess the economic viability of what they're doing. But it also means that the entire counterargument focused on bovine serum costs is no longer relevant. And many required nutrients today are industrially grown in bacteria or algae (for example, most of the vitamins in a daily multivitamin).

And the hygiene portion was premised on using Class 8 clean rooms for production, i.e., the most hygienic clean rooms currently recognized. The difference in cost between a Class 5 clean room (the lowest level of recognized "clean room", and the one used by pharmaceutical production, nanotech production, medical device production, etc.) and a Class 8 clean room is like the difference between an integrated GPU and a 6090 TI Founder's Edition. The problem with assuming the absolute top-of-the-line equipment would be required is that this was the assumption that drove this entire portion of the counterargument, down to facility size, equipment requirements, etc., ignoring entirely how production actually occurs in the real world.

[elcritch]

In theory would it be possible (at scale) to design and deploy completely self contained pods? Essentially, seal them up and they run through a decontamination cycle then you use pre-steralized sealed starter kits from the Class 8 clean rooms?

Though, complete sterilization of even a sealed closed environment is hard, and if using heat can require a lot of energy. Then I guess you'd need to pasteurize all nutrients as well.

Makes me wonder if a form of fermentation could be made to work with meet growth? It'd screw with cell density of the meet, but perhaps you could create an artificial symbiosis. The fermentation bacteria inhibit growth of bad bacteria, but wouldn't take too much of the overall energy from the meat cells.

Wow, that's a tricky problem.

[vagabund]

Do you have a link or could you explain more about the actual hygiene requirements? I remember reading the linked article at the time and the challenge of keeping cells bacteria free did sound pretty daunting.

[echelon]

Start cloning some animal thymuses and bone marrow. Fill the cultures with immune cells.

[dflock]

Just testing the viability of that one sentence would be a decade long research project for a large, well funded lab - and it would definitely not work as described.

Cell culture is hard, immune systems are incredibly complex. Bone marrow cells are very hard to culture, relative to other cells - we literally figured out how last year, just about, for one of the cell types in bone marrow niches. The collection of complex cell types in bone marrow and are only one component in a functional immune system.