The mummified corpse of one of Sir John Franklin's men from the ill-fated 1845 Arctic expedition. Image Source: pinterest.
There is a new post up on my other blog, The Dragonfly (here), which describes my work on the 1845 Franklin expedition. Ridley Scott has produced a new television series on the same subject, which plays on the explorers' horror as they confronted death in an endless, barren wilderness. The show premieres on 26 March 2018.
Tissue culture “clean meat” already in 2018? I’ve long been looking forward to this.https://t.co/p41NR3NEZn
What if human meat is grown? Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism? An interesting test case for consequentialist morality versus “yuck reaction” absolutism.
No sooner did labs begin developing the ability to 3D print a fake hamburger, than Oxford-based evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, stampeded straight for the less obvious question: why not 3D print a burger made of artificial human meat?
Inside the Quest to Make Lab Grown Meat | WIRED (16 February 2018). Video Source: Youtube.
Give him the benefit of the doubt for a moment. It may have been a Swiftian joke. Maybe it was clickbait. Dawkins was Oxford's professor for the 'Public Understanding of Science' until 2008, so he must know about outreach.
A 3D printer creating fake meat. Image Source: ByFlow via BBC.
Over the past few years, the major news outlets have promised that lab grown meat is coming to your table and that this is a good thing: Washington Post, BBC, Bloomberg, The Economist, Reuters. Motherboard and the BBC have covered the topic since the new year. BBC reported that Dutch firm ByFlow has started selling its 3D meat printers to restaurants. ByFlow's motto is: "Think. Design. Eat." Memphis Meats (backed by Bill Gates) and Mosa Meat are two artificial meat start-ups which will start selling fake meat for public consumption by 2021. Another cellular agriculture company is New Harvest.
In the third week of February 2018, news outlets reported that the US Cattlemen's Association filed a petition to the US Department of Agriculture, Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA) against the Silicon Valley start-ups which are creating lab-grown meat. You can read their petition here. They focused primarily on the definition of real meat as created from animals which have been raised and slaughtered, so that fake meat cannot be labeled as genuine meat, thereby misleading consumers.
The Meat of the Future: How Lab-Grown Meat Is Made (2 October 2015). Video Source: Youtube.
Lab meat, also known as clean meat, is touted as cruelty free, especially to vegetarians. Vegan Insightreported on 16 March 2018 that 41 per cent of Britons will eat "lab-grown clean meat and fish" in the next decade.
It is one small step to Dawkins' fake human meat. Fake cannibalism will probably get a lot of support. Under the video below the jump, one girl commented: "As a vegan, I'd be happy to eat cultured human meat. I'm actually very curious and not grossed out at all."
Joe Rogan's interviewee in this video, Sam Harris, said (here) that there was "zero ethical problem ... if this was never attached to an animal, we're dealing with concepts here," that is, the vegan girl would be eating an object cultivated in a vat of human cells.
This issue highlights a moral blind spot in technological progress; it proves that technology is skewing the human ability to judge right from wrong.
I am pleased today to announce the launch of my writer's Website, https://www.lcdouglass.com, and the companion blog about writing and media, The Dragonfly. The opening post is here.
On The Dragonfly, I will introduce myself and describe my background, after years of writing under a pen name. This includes the story of how I came to write Histories of Things to Come.
To expand HOTTC's original aim to tell a 'real time history' of the turn of the Millennium, I will develop more substantial research and vlogging projects, and take a snapshot of our world today. How are we sitting in relation to our history? How is technology affecting the remnants of the past?
These new Websites and social media pages will be part of book publications and the development of new projects.
