The Scientists Growing Human Skin for Robots Are Also Growing Meat

[00:00:00]From the researchers who brought you a living human skin for robots, you remember the flesh thing? Yes, the cultured human skin cells that have been arranged into an oddly terrifying face.

[00:00:09]Those researchers from Tokyo are moving into growing flesh for consumption. To be fair, the process that it takes to grow stem cells in humans is the exact same process that's used to grow consumable animal tissue, and in this case they made chicken.

[00:00:23]There are a few problems when it comes to creating lab-grown meat, one of which is that they're grown in bioreactors.

[00:00:28]So, you end up with individual cells, and they kind of end up being a ground meat that can be turned into something like a sausage. If you really want a juicy steak, you're going to have to make something that looks a lot more like a living animal before it gets turned into ground beef. Which is where the flesh thing comes in handy, because it is just tissue, and tissue can be vascularized. So, if you want to create something that looks a whole lot more like something you could buy on the grocery store shelf, you're going to have to build it. Flesh thing came from this paper, by the way, and it could potentially be a living, growing, feeling skin that could interface with robots. It's not actually called the flesh thing, that's something that I like to call it. So, our researchers made something that looks a lot like a circulatory system for a slab of chicken. The result is something that looks far more like meat, and something that could actually come in potentially a steak, in this case a chicken steak.

[00:01:14]That may really not sound appetizing to you, but it's really not all that different from coming from an animal.

[00:01:19]There's just a lot less suffering involved, but it still makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. We do have a long way to go before we can create, say, a steak, because we also have to do things like create the fat. Although we could potentially produce the absolutely perfect steak in a lab. Interestingly enough, we're also going to have to exercise it. If you've ever had store-bought chicken that, say, is grown to be really large, you're actually eating some atrophied muscle tissue, and you know the difference between gamey meat and store-bought meat that's been grown in a factory farm. Essentially, if we don't exercise it at all, or even if we don't have all of the tissues present, it's going to taste really weird.

[00:01:56]I'm really not against eating cultured meat. I do not see the problem. I understand that a lot of people just do not like the idea of it or think that it's unnatural, and that is reasonable.

[00:02:06]It is unnatural, I will give you that.

[00:02:09]There is also the other side of it because yes, these same methods are being used to create at least prototypes for human skin for robots. It's very difficult to engineer something that is comparable to a human body or any animal body. After all, we've had billions of years of evolution. And we are not even talking about borrowing the systems. We are talking about full-on plagiarism, taking human skin cells. And I really don't think this will catch on. It is creepy and I think kind of adorable, but I don't think it's going to become commonplace unless we figure out how to keep it alive because it needs an entire body. We have seen some other cool papers like the fungal skin or this paper which decided to incorporate plants into the skin of a robot. And I think it's important to note that these are just proof of principles. It doesn't mean that we're ever going to see this incorporated into commercial product. It was scientists trying an idea.

[00:02:57]Some of these things can be truly unsettling, and I have a lot of fun with that. But I think people assume that because some researchers tried it, that means that it's going to be scalable to commercial production. That is simply and unfortunately not the case. Although I do say unfortunately, and I'm not entirely sure if I want to see the flesh thing actually covering a robot.

[00:03:16]I mean, come on. If I saw that walking down the street, I would probably never leave my house again. I do hope you've enjoyed finding out that the people who made this thing are now making lab-grown meat. I will always keep you up to date.

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