Science and the sciences: a question of synthesis
(… is there a doctor in the room?… )
Hello, Albert.
I wanted to submit another small reflection, this time on a general topic: the history of synthetic meat. What is seriously worrying me is that almost all the articles that talk about it don't seriously refer to the basics of molecular biology (the conventional name of the science of DNA and its replication, as you well know), the study of which gives us the possibility of producing in large quantities muscle tissue of animal origin. Obviously this is not done for a reason: anyone who has even the simple smattering of this science (I studied it to become a dentist and not a molecular biologist, therefore…) knows that the more a DNA and therefore a cell replicates, the more errors and anomalies. In nature, many mechanisms compensate for this dynamic: sexual reproduction and the death of individuals when their DNA is now a sieve (aging, neoplastic diseases, some viral diseases) basically also fulfill this function (along with many others). The fact of feeding on healthy slaughtered animals and not on carcasses does not serve to be unnecessarily cruel, but to reduce the risk of ingesting pathogenic agents (viruses, bacteria, prions) and potentially harmful tissues because they could contain genetic material that somehow finds a replication pathway (who would eat a tumor without worrying, especially if they know what molecular oncologists are discovering in recent years?).
Currently every steak we eat is different from the other from a molecular biological point of view, but potentially in the future we could always eat the same thing (which increases and does not decrease the risk that it could cause damage). Do you remember that the mad cow prion started spreading when we fed bone ground to cows? What if in recombining the DNA of the infinite steak gave birth to a prion or other anomaly capable of spreading? These are questions that you don't want to give an answer to, not only because it doesn't exist yet, but as you too have often underlined in other fields because it is politically convenient not to give it, this is how the science of chance is invented, which in this period has usurped the name of ecology, forgetting that THE sciences are always many (especially those that contribute to human well-being) and their results must be known and reconciled, however long and difficult the synthesis is.
I hope I haven't bored you. I take this opportunity to wish you a happy Easter without clogging up your phone on Sunday.
A hug.
One of the passage.
(… I declare the general discussion open. I limit myself to reminding ourselves that where the "green" discourse is going, in particular in the "degrowth" variant, we have always said to each other, since the remote beginnings . The surprise – if you will consider it as such – it lies in the acceleration of events. The pandemic has helped in the descent, for obvious reasons, but the change is only quantitative – we go faster! – not qualitative: where we were going was clear to those who didn't was enraptured by the sleep of Sleeping Beauty.My contribution as an economist is always the same: instead of babbling about Satanism, of babbling about conspiracies, try to take a look at the economic dynamics that want to push us beyond the natural, beyond the human. It will be more useful to you and others… )
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/04/lascienza-e-le-scienze-questione-di.html on Tue, 04 Apr 2023 14:59:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.