Theos-Talk Archives (June 1998 Message tt00256)

At 10:11 AM 6/12/98 +0900, you wrote:
>Here is an ethical question I have been thinking about:
>
>If in the future geneticists are able to grow meat in a laboratory and the
>meat is identical to say a steak but never existed as part of a living
>animal, would it be ok to eat it?
>
>Darren

Darren,

There are two (at least) possible ways to make meat with nanotechnology.

The first way is to take a real chunk of meat and put it in the "analyzer."
 This program takes every observable molecule of meat and memorizes it,
perhaps for a miniscule section of the real thing, and then repeats the
observed and memorized portion an appropriate number of times to arrive at
the size we want.  When the analyzer has arrived at an appropriate
"program" it then begins to work through the molecular combinations with
its "elemental soup" for raw material.

Since man is ever bent on improving things however, the second way to make
meat means taking the program and improving it:  removing impurities and
unnecessary components and "purifying" what was found in the real thing
until we have a significant other program that doesn't match the
composition of the first.

This type of adapted substance is my preference.

Brenda
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