Bloomberg -- Lab-Grown Meat / use of immortalized cells ................................................
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Bloomberg Businessweek
February 7, 2023
Lab-Grown Meat Has a Bigger Problem Than the Lab
Leading scientists agree that cultured meat products won’t give you cancer, but the industry doesn’t have the decades of data to prove it -- so it’s trying to avoid the question instead.
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excerpts :
<<<<< ... normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.
Don’t worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren’t human, it’s essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all. >>>>>
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<<<<< Cells become immortal in human bodies all the time, by mutating to bypass senescence -- and mutating some more to evade the immune system, which generally tries to kill off such mutants. Cultured meat companies induce these changes via genetic modification or by forcing normal cells to reproduce until some of them mutate. The resulting cells can divide forever, defying the normal limits of growth. This also makes them unmistakably more like cancer cells than they used to be, says Robert Weinberg, the pioneering Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist who proved cancer is a genetic disease in the 1980s. “If a cell is immortalized, that implies that it’s already completed one of the prerequisites to become a cancer cell,” he says. >>>>>
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