Are Henrietta Lacks Cells/Processes
Being Used to Create Immortalized Meat For Human Consumption?
To immortalize your primary cells, you can use either hTERT or SV40 T antigens for cells that can be cultured for over 10 passages. It is recommended that SV40 T antigens be used for difficult–to–immortalize primary cells such as epithelial cells. The need to produce immortal, food-relevant cell lines is one of the most pressing challenges of cellular agriculture, the field which seeks to produce meat and other animal products via tissue engineering and synthetic biology. Immortal cell lines have a long and complicated story, from the first recognized immortal human cell lines taken from Henrietta Lacks, to today, where they are used to assay toxicity and produce therapeutics, to the Present, where they are being used to create meat without harming an animal.
Although work in immortal cell lines began more than 50 years ago, there are few existing cell lines made of species and cell types appropriate for cultured meat. Cells in cultured meat is being eaten by consumers; therefore, cultured meat cell lines also require unique attributes not selected for in other cell line applications. Specifically, cultured meat cell lines will have been approved by the US Government as safe for consumption as food, proliferate and differentiate efficiently at industrial scales, and have desirable taste, texture, and nutrition characteristics for consumers. So yet again we have the stolen cells of a black woman being used to create a billion dollar industry with no reparations to her family where the masses will literally feed on her remains!
Cellular agriculture is an emerging field that aims to produce animal products from cell cultures rather than whole animals. One of the anticipated products of cellular agriculture is cultured meat made in vitro from animal cell cultures, also known as cell-based meat, cultivated meat, in vitro meat, clean meat, artificial meat, or lab-grown meat. Multiple names exist due to a lack of consensus on a term that is both informative to consumers and accurate by technical and regulatory standards!
The development of cultured meat products required overcoming major technological challenges in adapting and developing bioengineering technology for food production, including bioreactors, cell culture media, bioscaffolds, and cell lines, as well as major challenges in consumer acceptance and new food regulations so of course we don't want to discuss immortalizing cells and that history of theft by the medical industry of cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks. Cultured meat will be composed of cells; therefore, ready access to reliable, safe, and what is deemed culinarily appropriate sources of cells is required for both the research and eventual production of cultured meat. It should not be surprising that black people are deemed safe for white consumption they have been doing it since chattel slavery began.They even made a whole industry ofchocolate hands from Belgium around the joke of eating the chopped of hands of children from the Congo. Not to mention a century of ingesting the mummified remains of Egyptians in English tea called Mumia thought to prolong life!
There is even a book the Delectable Negro that highlights not only cookbooks and the homoeroticism involved in eating black men, but also a history of how black people were routinely eaten on slave ships if food ran out on a voyage there are still existing records of the practice with eyewitness accounts by slaves of how meals were chosen and how they were prepared on ships! So making meat from a black woman's cell biology is no big thing to an industry looking to make billions globally! Cell lines become immortal when they lose their cell cycle checkpoint pathways and circumvent the process of senescence. There are currently three methods to establish immortal cell lines: the discovery of spontaneously immortalized cell lines, expression of the catalytic subunit of telomerase (TERT), or induction by viral genes that inactivate p53/p14/Rb. Each method utilizes either telomerase expression or inactivation/bypassing of the cell cycle, or both. These changes can be directed by genetic manipulation.
In rare events, most often in cancer, cells will spontaneously immortalize. These cells can then be isolated. Tissue must be sampled by biopsy and then dissociated, and the cell types must be isolated and tested for proliferative capacity and identity. This was the original method to obtain cell lines beginning with the first immortal cell line derived in the 1940s from mouse fibroblasts, as well as the HeLa cell line isolated from the cervical cancer of Henrietta Lacks. Immortality of the HeLa cells could be attributed to the cells’ infection with human papillomavirus 18, which may have either degraded the tumor-suppressor protein p53 or caused chromothripsis, a chromosome-shattering and rearrangement associated with 2–3% of all cancers and which changes the expressions of thousands of protein-coding genes.
Spontaneous immortalization can be coordinated by scientists. Cancer can be induced by radiation or chemical carcinogens. A cell line can also be put under serial passaging to select for clones with immortalization markers, high TERT expression or low p15/p16/Rb expression. One example of spontaneously immortalized cell lines in cultured meat is the chicken fibroblast line used by the company Future Meat. The Future Meat cell line was created by culturing fibroblasts isolated from a chick embryo, and isolating, concentrating, and expanding the foci of more rapidly growing cells until there was a culture of uniform morphology that was able to survive past the 20–30 divisions undergone by an unmodified somatic cell.
But spontaneous immortalization has its limitations, and may be more suitable for some situations and less suitable for others. For example, spontaneously immortalized cells would likely not be considered genetically modified (GM), which could allow them to have access to European markets that currently have strict regulations on GM foods. Under other jurisdictions, however, spontaneously immortalized cells may be held with concern as equivalent to cancerous cells. As noted in the HeLa cell line, the process of spontaneous immortalization often results in a number of additional mutations that are not required for immortalization, and which may alter other aspects of the cells in unpredictable ways.
Finally, different cell types have different predispositions towards spontaneous immortalization. Fish, for instance, have a high propensity for spontaneous immortalization due to the naturally high regenerative capacity of their adult stem cell population throughout their lifecycle, whereas mammals have more regulation checks in place to limit spontaneous immortalization
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