How come we have been able to clone animals for 25 years but I cant get a lab-grown burger yet?
In: Biology
The lamb-clonings of the 90s actually weren’t terribly successful, even though a few specimens were birthed they suffered from a lot of cellular-level health issues that we’ve only started to understand recently. It’s also not really a related process, since the 90s “clones” were more like test-tube babies than something wholly artificially grown.
But to answer your question: The goal of lab-grown meat is to engineer *just* the muscle tissue, not the entire creature. The idea is to make just the part of the animal we eat, sparing us the cruelty of having to slaughter an animal and potentially saving tons of money spent nurturing livestock.
Cloning would be a very wasteful way to try to achieve lab-grown meat, and would still be as ethically-fraught as how we obtain meat now.
If you could somehow clone an animal, but leave out most of its brain, skeleton, and fur then we’d be in pretty good shape… making skinless monstrosities to eat.
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