{"id":22,"date":"2008-05-18T06:16:27","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T11:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/2008\/05\/18\/22\/"},"modified":"2008-05-18T06:18:18","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T11:18:18","slug":"22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/2008\/05\/18\/22\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture tissue products"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a rather macabre exhibit has been on display. Entitled &#8216;Victimless Leather&#8217;, it&#8217;s a miniature &#8216;leather&#8217; jacket made from living mouse stem cells growing on a polymer matrix. <\/p>\n<p>As art, one interpretation could be that it shows how artifacts currently made from dead animal bits can instead be grown from tissue cultures; another might be that it illustrates the incredibly weird implications of modern biology.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, given unlimited nutrients and a lack of other constraints, tissue cultures have a tendency to keep on growing, which this one did. After a week or two, it clogged several of its nutrient feeds, making it necessary that it be put down. &#8220;I felt cruel when I turned it off,&#8221; said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator responsible for killing it.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s been a lot of coverage of this; here&#8217;s a few articles:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/05\/13\/science\/13coat.html?_r=1&amp;oref=slogin\">New York Times<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/blog.bioethics.net\/2008\/05\/victimless-leather-and-yet-theres-still-regret\/\">Bioethics.net<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/io9.com\/387274\/curator-forced-to-kill-out+of+control-bio+art-exhibit\">io9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/moma.org\/exhibitions\/2008\/elasticmind\/#\/294\">Museum of Modern Art<\/a> &#8211; unfortunately, I don&#8217;t appear to able to access their site at the moment.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A related issue is &#8216;test tube meat&#8217; &#8211; meat grown from cell cultures in a laboratory. Intriguingly, PETA, a sometimes radical animal rights group, have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peta.org\/feat_in_vitro_contest.asp\">stumped up a $1,000,000 reward for its development.<\/a>. Clearly this is because this approach would alleviate the suffering of a great many farm animals. It may well also reduce the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.p2pays.org\/ref\/02\/01910.htm\">environmental burden<\/a> caused by industrial scale animal husbandry.<\/p>\n<p>I find both of these items really intriguing, as it brings up many interesting questions. If you&#8217;re game, please leave a comment with your answers to these questions..<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Is the use of tissue cultures more or less ethical than the use of parts taken from dead animals? Are concerns of dignity relevant here?<\/li>\n<li>Is it ethical to use human tissue cultures in art?\n<\/li>\n<li>Is it ethical to use human tissue cultured from human induced pluripotent stem cells?<\/li>\n<li>For those who aren&#8217;t against the use of embryonic stem cells in research, how would you feel about tissue cultured from such a line being used in art, remembering that this wouldn&#8217;t necessitate the destruction of additional embryos &#8211; once created, the cell line can be grown and divided effectively indefinitely.<\/li>\n<li>What other uses of human tissue cultures are ethical? If it&#8217;s more ethical to use tissue cultures than animal parts, what uses of human parts cross the line into acceptable? Transplant organ growth? Regenerative therapies? Long Pig?<\/li>\n<li>Is forming an emotional relationship with an object made from live cells more or less strange than forming emotional relationships with animals? With non-living organisms? With plants? Would you love your living leather coat more or less than your regular leather coat<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>(x-posted to <a href=\"http:\/\/aigantighe.livejournal.com\">LJ<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a rather macabre exhibit has been on display. Entitled &#8216;Victimless Leather&#8217;, it&#8217;s a miniature &#8216;leather&#8217; jacket made from living mouse stem cells growing on a polymer matrix. As art, one interpretation could be that it shows how artifacts currently made from dead animal bits can instead\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/2008\/05\/18\/22\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[43,44,45],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scitech","tag-bioethics","tag-meat","tag-questions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meme-hazard.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}