Mammoth meatball

Mammoth meatball   Whole story at the link, edited version below.

AMSTERDAM, March 28 (Reuters) - A giant meatball made from flesh cultivated using the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth was unveiled on Tuesday at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands.

The meatball was created by Australian cultured meat company Vow which - promising this was not an April Fools' joke - said it wanted to get people talking about cultured meat, calling it a more sustainable alternative for real meat.

"We wanted to create something that was totally different from anything you can get now," Vow founder Tim Noakesmith told Reuters, adding that an additional reason for choosing mammoth is that scientists believe that the animal's extinction was caused by climate change.

And they say science is boring.   

I saw an article about that earlier and it said, "Scientists think it would be a bad idea to eat the meat made from extinct proteins."

Or something to that effect.

z31maniac said:

I saw an article about that earlier and it said, "Scientists think it would be a bad idea to eat the meat made from extinct proteins."

Or something to that effect.

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

That's pretty gross. 

Can the Bronto-Burger be far behind?

TR7 said:

 

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

hmmmmm

Hey, I am about to take this car up to 140 and go into that tight corner with the cliff on the other side.  How confident are you in  the brakes you just fixed on it?

"probably fine"

TR7 said:

z31maniac said:

I saw an article about that earlier and it said, "Scientists think it would be a bad idea to eat the meat made from extinct proteins."

Or something to that effect.

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

Just a fringe science fan here, but I'm fairly positive people have eaten preserved mammoth with no ill effects. I recall an interview involving mammoth stew from an archeological/paleontological dig not that many years back. 

I'm more leery of the idea of cultured meat than preserved for thousands of years meat personally, but I'd still try this given the chance.

In reply to RevRico :

But it doesn't say "meat preserved for  thousands of years". 
 

It says "cultured from extinct mammoth DNA". 

What the berkeley does THAT mean??

Is myoglobin DNA?

Please explain like I'm 5 

aircooled said:

TR7 said:

 

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

hmmmmm

Hey, I am about to take this car up to 140 and go into that tight corner with the cliff on the other side.  How confident are you in  the brakes you just fixed on it?

"probably fine"

You will probably walk outside tomorrow and not get bonked by a meteorite, not certain, but probably. I would rank death by meteorite and eating synthetic mammoth meat about the same likelihood. If you can eat elephant (not that anyone should), you can eat mammoth. 

RevRico said:

TR7 said:

z31maniac said:

I saw an article about that earlier and it said, "Scientists think it would be a bad idea to eat the meat made from extinct proteins."

Or something to that effect.

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

Just a fringe science fan here, but I'm fairly positive people have eaten preserved mammoth with no ill effects. I recall an interview involving mammoth stew from an archeological/paleontological dig not that many years back. 

I'm more leery of the idea of cultured meat than preserved for thousands of years meat personally, but I'd still try this given the chance.

Yes, I dont recall any stew stories, just cooked plain, and from what I was told it tasted pretty terrible.

I know about the biology of mammoths (and a couple select mammals), so not an expert on lab grown meat, though I understand the process. However, the opposite of your feelings, I would have no qualms about eating lab cultured meat. You know its clean, the composition, and construction. I would not be in line for meat that has been hanging around for thousands of years however.... You have no idea what pathogens have decided to call it home at any point. 

TR7 said:

aircooled said:

TR7 said:

 

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

hmmmmm

Hey, I am about to take this car up to 140 and go into that tight corner with the cliff on the other side.  How confident are you in  the brakes you just fixed on it?

"probably fine"

You will probably walk outside tomorrow and not get bonked by a meteorite, not certain, but probably. I would rank death by meteorite and eating synthetic mammoth meat about the same likelihood. If you can eat elephant (not that anyone should), you can eat mammoth. 

Yeah, and this isn't anything against aircooled, but I've noticed many people of the world have a hard time with the difference between possible and probable.

Just because something is possible, doesn't mean it's probable.

yupididit said:

Is myoglobin DNA?

Please explain like I'm 5 

Myoglobin is a protein, not DNA.

To put in a very simplistic way; the food animals eat gets broken down into its much smaller rudimentary building blocks. DNA is a set of instructions for the body on what to build with those building blocks (proteins, fats, ect.). One of the things it can build is the protein myoglobin, which is a component in muscles.

In this case, a specific part of DNA of sheep muscle cells was changed so instead of instructions to produce sheep myoglobin when building muscle, it built mammoth myoglobin to incorporate into muscle. 

You can very loosely think of it as an organ transplant. If you accept a kidney from a donor, you will no longer be producing your specific kidney hormones in your body, because your kidneys are gone, and in its place you will be producing the donors hormones. 

In reply to TR7 :

Thank You! 

z31maniac said:

TR7 said:

aircooled said:

TR7 said:

 

My time to shine!!! 

Hello, your friendly GRM mammoth scientist here (for real). Its probably fine to eat. 

hmmmmm

Hey, I am about to take this car up to 140 and go into that tight corner with the cliff on the other side.  How confident are you in  the brakes you just fixed on it?

"probably fine"

You will probably walk outside tomorrow and not get bonked by a meteorite, not certain, but probably. I would rank death by meteorite and eating synthetic mammoth meat about the same likelihood. If you can eat elephant (not that anyone should), you can eat mammoth. 

Yeah, and this isn't anything against aircooled, but I've noticed many people of the world have a hard time with the difference between possible and probable.

Just because something is possible, doesn't mean it's probable.

I think its also difficult to bridge different fields and experiences into a common vernacular. What I would think of probable, lets call it 99.95%, others might only need a majority event, say 50.05%. Especially in the work I do, opposing event probabilities can reach infinitesimally small numbers, but never zero. Therefore things will always be probable, but never certain, and that trips up a lot of people. 

Its like the trope "So you're telling me there is a chance!!!". 

In reply to TR7 :

I realize you are speaking from a statistical analysis perspective.

In common vernacular I would say "probable" means "likely to happen".

In reply to TR7 :

I'm really curious...

Your entire career surrounds the study of mammoths?

No slight intended.. im trying to learn. What's the application to the world today of full time mammoth study?  I would have thought that would be a subset of a larger field of scientific study. I had no idea people could just focus on mammoths, and I'm really curious how that translates in real world application.

Teach me. (BTW.. nice job on the 5 year old description of myoglobin. I learned something!)

These can't  be real  Australian's that did this. 
They should have given the meatball & a Fosters to Daniel Ricardo, couldn't be worse than a shoey. 

SV reX said:

In reply to TR7 :

I'm really curious...

Your entire career surrounds the study of mammoths?

No slight intended.. im trying to learn. What's the application to the world today of full time mammoth study?  I would have thought that would be a subset of a larger field of scientific study. I had no idea people could just focus on mammoths, and I'm really curious how that translates in real world application.

Teach me. (BTW.. nice job on the 5 year old description of myoglobin. I learned something!)

In a broad sense, my research is on identifying genetic changes and predicting their biological impacts, I focused on mammoth in the beginning of my career, but the skill-set can be applied to many things.

The first half of my career was the study of extinct or near extinct animals and their unique environmentally-related genome adaptations; likely reasons mammoths thrived and possible reasons for their later decline. Once you kick that door open (proven yourself and your methods) the real world application applies in pharma, hospitals, biotech, investment banks, disease and population research, engineering, cancer, military, invasive species eradication... I switched to agriculture and now work to fortify US food production in the face of adverse events (drought, disease, inbreeding, ecological damage, population needs, ect.). 

TR7 said:

yupididit said:

Is myoglobin DNA?

Please explain like I'm 5 

Myoglobin is a protein, not DNA.

To put in a very simplistic way; the food animals eat gets broken down into its much smaller rudimentary building blocks. DNA is a set of instructions for the body on what to build with those building blocks (proteins, fats, ect.). One of the things it can build is the protein myoglobin, which is a component in muscles.

In this case, a specific part of DNA of sheep muscle cells was changed so instead of instructions to produce sheep myoglobin when building muscle, it built mammoth myoglobin to incorporate into muscle. 

You can very loosely think of it as an organ transplant. If you accept a kidney from a donor, you will no longer be producing your specific kidney hormones in your body, because your kidneys are gone, and in its place you will be producing the donors hormones. 

That's a really freaky thought!

You know, that meatball isn't even all that big, really.  I can see calling it "large," but "mammoth?"  I dunno.

Just be thankful they decided to go with the lab cultured meat instead of cloning a herd of extinct animals and raising them in a farm...or shall we call it a park for Jurassic creatures? 

TR7 said:

SV reX said:

In reply to TR7 :

I'm really curious...

Your entire career surrounds the study of mammoths?

No slight intended.. im trying to learn. What's the application to the world today of full time mammoth study?  I would have thought that would be a subset of a larger field of scientific study. I had no idea people could just focus on mammoths, and I'm really curious how that translates in real world application.

Teach me. (BTW.. nice job on the 5 year old description of myoglobin. I learned something!)

In a broad sense, my research is on identifying genetic changes and predicting their biological impacts, I focused on mammoth in the beginning of my career, but the skill-set can be applied to many things.

The first half of my career was the study of extinct or near extinct animals and their unique environmentally-related genome adaptations; likely reasons mammoths thrived and possible reasons for their later decline. Once you kick that door open (proven yourself and your methods) the real world application applies in pharma, hospitals, biotech, investment banks, disease and population research, engineering, cancer, military, invasive species eradication... I switched to agriculture and now work to fortify US food production in the face of adverse events (drought, disease, inbreeding, ecological damage, population needs, ect.). 

That's really cool!

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

I'm holding out for the ribs

In reply to Keith Tanner :

People are actively trying. Scientifically it's possible, ethically it's kinda grey. Like using CRISPR to make a unicorn. 

For someone like myself whose morals and ethics change depending on what I want or need at the time and how it would effect me, it's awesome, but disappointingly financially unavailable.