Curator euthanizes living leather jacket made from human mouse stem-cells

A curator at NY-MOMA had to euthanize a living leather jacket made from ~~human~~ mouse stem-cells -- the art-work had grown out of control and threatened to overflow its containment unit.

One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened...
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat...That thing was never alive before it was grown.”

Link (via Futurismic)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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dmatos

@#16 – what if I voluntarily donated some of my own stem cells to be grown into delicious human burgers in test tubes?
UnderRat

@#17
Aside from a whole string of narcissistic and homoerotic issues that come to mind, people could tell you to ‘go eat yourself’ and you could just smile back with a mouth full of DMATOS burger. I just wouldn’t want to know what your special sauce was.
dmatos

I ate my liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
Umbriel

#15 MarkMarkMark — I’m sure individual vegans and vegetarians have their own opinions, but apparently PETA is fully onboard with “test-tube meat”, such that it’s actually offering a research prize in that field:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89942776
dainel

We’re not quite ready for lab meat yet. Because of the need to feed it with serum, it kinds of defeats the entire purpose. But how about a special breed of animal that can be harvested without killing it?

When a mosquito feeds on me, it does not eat all of me and kill me. Why can’t we cut a little meat from the animal, let it grow back, and repeat. Though the animal has a brain, we could anesthesize it before cutting; or it could simply be engineered to not have nerves in the body part we plan to harvest.

We’re not actually killing the animal. It would be kind of like harvesting wool from sheep. This reminds me of a story about a race of intelligent, pacifist, giant lizards; with tails that can detach like geckos’ tails. The humans periodically eat their king’s tail (which of course does not kill him), as a way to humiliate them, and to show their dominance.
airship

You mean I’ll be able to buy a coat someday that can grow to fit me no matter how big I get? Bring It On!
EncarnacionFlor

@#31 Vorlon et al:
It is kinda quirky to read the phrase “playing God.” Thus far, it has been impossible for a human to create something literally out of nothing. Once humans can achieve this by their own power, then we can say that we are playing God. But so far, all we can do is manipulate the matter and energy already created. That said, we are perfectly capable of honoring or dishonoring The Creator with what that Creator made, since we are given that option. And He* has let us know what He* is pleased and peeved by. (*He mostly self-identifies as male.)

Anyway, as for me, so long as all animal life involved is taken as painlessly as possible and human tissue is used with educated consent of the person behind that tissue, I myself see nothing wrong with doing things like this. I do not know what the Creator feels about it, and I don’t know the artist that made this nor why he did. I’m not gonna judge him, because that is *not* my job.
Roach

Oh man, I am all for mad science as art. I want a whole exhibition of stuff like this.

This has nothing to do with pro-choice or pro-life because it wasn’t human.
Metlin

That is *so* cool! Best. Headline. EVAH!
noen

“It is kinda quirky to read the phrase “playing God.” Thus far, it has been impossible for a human to create something literally out of nothing.”

Sadly, No.
Physicists Create Universe Smaller Than a Marble

Particles spontaneously pop into being all the time anyway. It’s called the quantum flux, it’s nothing special. We’ve also been making life (very simple proto cells) from non living amino acids and such for some time now.
stanfrombrooklyn

I find the terminology “euthanize” and “kill” rather misleading here. It adds some spice to the headlines; but if I remove live bacteria from fermenting milk nobody would say that I “euthanized” the yogurt even though I would be preventing it from growing.

But I have always wondered why the leather coat I bought in the East Village 17 years ago still fits me perfectly even though I’m at least 30 pounds heavier. Maybe it’s been growing too!
markmarkmark

or cows that want us to eat them!
morehumanthanhuman

#25 the problem isn’t pruning the jacket it’s having a big enough containment vessel to make an actual jacket.

#25 I too wouldn’t eat this thing, not because of the laboratory experiment food factor, but because it’s primarily composed of necrotic(dead, yucky, and degraded tissue) tissue. Any tissue thicker than a centimeter tends to dies because it can’t get acces to nutrients. We can’t get good tasty artificial meat until someone figures out how to get blood vessels to grow.
Jake0748

It may have been living, and stem cells and all that. But I don’t see how it’s a jacket, it just looks like a little blob to me.
Antinous

You know, I think that I’ll just adopt a nice Guatemalan leather coat.
Tits McGee

I got to see the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit and it was amazing and incredibly thought-provoking. Go see it if you can.

The jacket was pretty big by the time I saw it, and the space containing it was pretty small, so I’m not surprised it became necessary to “kill” it.

Also, re: #16 and #17, your exchange made me think of this song (completely NSFW, and NSFDelicate Sensibilities as well).

Oh, and I’d totally eat lab-grown meat, but likely not my own.
DanDarey

As a vegan I have no problem with “lab meat”.

I’m vegan because I don’t want to support animal suffering, as much as it’s possible to live without it.

Obviously, “lab meat” doesn’t suffer in the same way as ,say, a factory famred pig. So , for me, it’s a more ethical choice just as organic meat is more ethical than factory farmed meat (in general, pedantic arguments and senseless debates aside).
DanDarey

“but is it ethical for people to treat animals in such a way that they become useless and as a result certain types of animals dissapear forever.”

Well, I’d rather there were no bears in China than the nightmareish bear farms that exist there, for example.
Sister Y

MarkMarkMark, interesting question! I see the suffering of conscious beings as the primary negative value in the world, so I’d be on the side of DanDarey that it’s actually wrong to intentionally bring conscious animals into the world, that will suffer, for our own purposes.

Well, I’d rather there were no bears in China than the nightmareish bear farms that exist there, for example.

Exactly.

Non-conscious living clothing I have no problem with.
License Farm

Damn, I wish this show was going on longer; I’d hoped to see it.

One day, we will all have cruelty-free leather garments that we can not only nibble on when we get peckish, but in fact will NEED to prune to avoid them growing out of control. A good thing they grow, since consuming them might turn us into bigger fatasses than we already are.
SamSam

Still on the vat-grown meat line…

One of the main reasons in the coming decades for everyone to become vegetarians will be the heavy energy costs associated with meat.

Will vat-grown meat require more or less energy than “in utero”-grown real meat?

I assume the vat grown meat will still require energy in the form of sugars, and I read something about electrical impulses being needed to “exercise” it.
dculberson

markmarkmark, I’m a vegetarian and would say that the idea of eating it would be kind of distasteful based up on the “yucky laboratory experiment food” factor, but the ethics wouldn’t bother me. The actual physical act of eating it might, though, since I tried to eat chicken and had horrid vomit and diarrhea afterwards.

I used to be a veg by choice, now .. not so much so.
Bender

C’mon people. Lab meat? You just know that it will taste like something from your elementary school cafeteria. Probably not even that good.
noen

This is brilliant.

Dick Cheney on the other hand, does have a living leather jacket made from human flesh.
noen

Vat raised meat isn’t even food. Grass fed beef is superior to feedlot beef just as free range chickens are better than factory chickens. Better tasting and better for you. Vat grown meat will be even less flavorful and offer fewer nutrients than real food.

Eat only real food, mostly vegetables, and not so much. Never eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognized as food. It most likely isn’t.
DanDarey

“C’mon people. Lab meat? You just know that it will taste like something from your elementary school cafeteria. Probably not even that good.”

Sometime in the future…Stick it in a bun with some pickle and sauces and it’ll be not much different to a beef burger :).

Shove it in nuggets, etc.
infoaddict

Late in the day, I know, but I had to respond to #32: i’ve never in my life seen a feral herd of cows, but i’ve seen countless wild ducks.

Australia has feral buffalo rampaging through the Northern Territory and demolishing the countryside; they’re the offspring of domestic cattle. Australia is also the (slightly unwilling) host to the largest “wild” camel herds outside of their native ranges – these, too, are the offspring of domestic camels.

If domestic animals are left without care, they all revert back to non-domestic status fairly readily – dogs, cats, rabbits, foxes – you name it, they all escape “into the wild” and survive. However, if they revert in a place they weren’t indigenous to originally, they then have this nasty tendency to start destroying the environment for the native creatures.

Farmers of livestock are more than just raisers of meat; they’re caretakers of the land on which they’re raising that meat, and have a responsibility not to allow escapees to go off and cause trouble …
JustMentioning

A little twist to the vat-meat story…

Cells grown in laboratory culture, whether that is mouse embryonic stem cells, human cells or nice meaty burger cells, feed on medium made up from a cocktail of nutrients. Typically this contains 5% – 20% serum – yes serum as in blood without the cells. Normally fetal bovine serum or newborn calf serum is used, which means quite a few calves will be ‘euthanized’ to grow your burger. Here the question to the veg-brigade: Would you mind your soya being grown on black pudding?
Maybe some late comfort for Ms Antonelli: by killing the jacket she may have saved a calf.
Carlos

This may be the single coolest headline I have ever read.
stumo

Um – the headline says human stem cells, but the article says they’re from mice.

So, tell me: are you a man, or a mouse? Squeak up!
jim.cowling

It’s less cool when you read the story and learn that there’s no human cells involved. They’re mouse stem cells.
markmarkmark

#49
“Sadly, No.”

Sadly, to your point, no.
Scientists made something from other things, which is not at all the same as making something from nothing, which is what was meant by “playing God.”

Also, as a fellow who’s spent a good amount of time interacting with cattle, I have to say I’m almost absolutely sure that they aren’t concious, but that I am absolutely sure that they’re delicious, so I eat them.

ALSO!
One of the primary benifits of vat grown meat would be that you don’t require acres upon acres of grazing land, or cattle ranchers or any of the work force that supports the meat industry – the time/money/energy saved by putting untold thousands out of work would more then cover the increased energy costs or whatever else would make vat grown meat expensive.

Personally, I’d love to live in a world where everyone eats healthy, locally produced food, and where cattle are treated well not because they have any sort of right but because as wardens of the earth it’s our responsibility to treat animals humanely.

my dog doesn’t love me because it can’t because he’s a dog, but i love him because i can because i’m a human and that’s what’s important.
remmelt

What does this have to do with pro-choice?
jesuguru

I can’t see how McNuggets (TM) would be any worse made with lab meat.

As far as the energy-saving argument, it’s interesting but I’m not too sure that it wouldn’t take as much (or perhaps vastly more) energy to “grow” meat for the meat-eating world than it does to raise the animals.

I’d also be interested in the initial market for it, considering the outcry (especially in Europe?) against genetically modified crops. This takes that principle to a whole other level.
ill lich

“This coat is so warm, but I just can’t afford to keep feeding it.”
racer x

“…it’s actually wrong to intentionally bring conscious animals into the world, that will suffer, for our own purposes.

Dammit! I was hoping to have children!
UnderRat

#35 TITSMCGEE
Holy Hell, that song was funny.
nanuq

“What does this have to do with pro-choice?”

The curator was experiencing complications and decided to abort. I’m just glad there were no picket signs.
HarshLanguage

#4 – Better publicity that way.
strider_mt2k

Oh yeah, as if you were gonna raise that coat as your own otherwise.

It’s all well and good to save these coats, but if nobody wants them then it doesn’t really make much sense.

Look at the Burlington Coat Factory in New Jersey for instance.
They sell coats really cheap but they still can’t sell them ALL!
noen

You’ve go that backwards RacerX. When you bring children into this world you will suffer, for their own evil purposes.
markmarkmark

okay now a follow up question for peta knowladgeable people – if, in the future, we have vat grown meat and vat grown milk and vat grown leather, who will take care of the domesticated animals that only exist to produce things for humans?
all the grazing land would no longer be needed for grazing, and there’s no way that farmers or business men would let the land lie bare.
cows, pigs and chickens would only be found on whatever farms still produced geniune meat, or in countries that couldn’t afford tasty test tube steaks.

anyways i guess my question is wouldn’t cheap and efficient vat grown meat push farm animals into a state of psuedo extinction?

clearly this is far off, if even possible, but i mean, the internet is a place for imagining and in a future where we didn’t have to raise and care for animals untill we could slaughter them then we wouldn’t actually need these animals anymore, and no one would just eat the cost to care for them.
could we make cows obsolete?
sirdook

Re: pro-choice

This just goes to show that our ordinary categories can mislead us in unusual situations. Presumably this coat, though ‘alive’ in some sense, had no central nervous system and so we have no more reason to think it has consciousness than we do a plant or bit of mold growing in the fridge (which is also alive, at least as much so as this coat).

Presumably we have no reason to be queasy about killing the mold in the fridge, but somehow the fact that these are mice cells makes this seem like something different.

Also the ‘pro-choice’ remark reflects confusion at another level. To be pro-choice is not necessarily to be pro-abortion or to think that one would choose abortion oneself. It’s to be, er, in favor of, er, individuals having a choice about doing it.

I’m pro-choice about watching American Idol, Survivor, and Jerry Springer, although I find the idea rather disgusting and would find it very difficult to imagine choosing it for myself except under extreme circumstances.
NickP

#49:
the time/money/energy saved by putting untold thousands out of work would more then cover the increased energy costs or whatever else would make vat grown meat expensive.

You sure about that? You are basically arguing that methods for producing animal cells in a totally artificial enviroment are cheaper/less energy intensive/less labor intensive than producing animal cells in an animal which has evolved for millions of years to do just that. I find that highly unlikely.

To grow cells, you need:
A temperature, humidity and atmosphere-controlled incubator
Compressed CO2 gas
gobs of antibiotics
Culture medium.

DMEM, a common culture medium includes highly purified
CaCl2
Fe(NO3).9H2O
KCl
MgSO4
NaCl
Na2HPO4.H2O2
D-Glucose
Phenol red
Sodium Pyruvate
L-Arginine.HCl
L-Cystine.2HCl
L-Glutamine
Glycine
L-HistidineHCl.H2O
L-Isoleucine
L-Leucine
L-Lysine.HCl
L-Methionine
L-Phenylalanine
L-Serine
L-Threonine
L-Tryptophan
L-Tyrosine.2Na.2H2O
L-Valine
D-Ca Pantothenate
Choline Chloride
Folic Acid
i-Inositol
Niacinamide
Riboflavin
Thiamine HCl
Pyndoxine HCl

The inorganic salts will presumably be synthesized from components that are mined. The vitamins and amino acids will be synthesized or purified from animals.

That’s just to get a simple mass of cells. If you want something palatable, it will require more technical refinements.

I’m willing to bet that pound for pound, vat-meat will be more labor intensive and more damaging to the environment than even the worst corn-fed feedlot beef.
UnderRat

Has SciFi Channel made a bad horror movie about this with Lou Diamond Phillips yet?
NickP

I’m with #23. Euthanize means to kill as painlessly as possible, so in the context of a mass of fibroblasts, it is completely meaningless.

re: #43, In addition to the fetal calf serum, cultured cells require constant levels of antibiotics to prevent mold and bacteria taking over the culture. The culture medium generally includes defined concentrations of highly purified inorganic salts, amino acids, etc which are not trivial to produce.

Even if it were feasible to grow vat-meat, it would be much, much more environmentally friendly to buy grass fed beef or free-range chicken from your local farmer’s market.
clueless in brooklyn

burling coat factory in new jersey? Hi, I’m art, let’s introduce ourselves..
Carlos

“Curator euthanizes living leather jacket made from Lou Diamond Phillips stem-cells.”

Now that’s a headline.
Kyle Armbruster

I’m with #8. I’m adamantly pro-choice but personally would only be involved in one in very narrow circumstances. There’s no disparity there. It’s my choice how to define those circumstances.

This guy has nothing to feel bad about. Even if it were alive it would just be a mouse. We kill those all the time (which isn’t to say I don’t feel a tinge of guilt when I see a smashed baby mouse in a trap, but oh well–it was him or my cheese).
fnc

Cows (any any domesticated farm animal) only exist in their current form because we needed something from them, and engineered them to give it to us. They’re not any more ‘natural’ a part of our world than roads or bridges. I mean, I wouldn’t advocate killing them off en masse just because we suddenly have all this delicious vat meat(tm), but I don’t see how their eventual extinction is some huge loss to the ‘natural’ order of things. Sheep we’ll keep, though. They’re cute and give us wool. And those fainting goats too, great fun to watch. And what the heck, chickens walk funny, why not keep a few of them. Ducks? Why would we get rid of ducks? They’re so personable. I guess what I’m getting at is we’d still have lots of farm animals around without needing their products for the same reason we keep dogs and cats without using anything them for their meat (in most places anyway).
Umbriel

AHHHH! Dad! It’s the chicken heart!
fathercrow

Also available in my hometown, Dublin Ireland, exhibited in the TechnoThreads exhibition in the Trinity College Science gallery.

http://www.sciencegallery.ie/

Have fun anyone from my neck of the woods.

Peace and Hope

FatherCrow
markmarkmark

here’s what i want to know.
vegans, vegitarians and peta – if mindless meat was grown just like this jacket… “thing” and we cooked it and ate it would that be unpleasent to their sensibilities?
wackyvorlon

You know, I think this is quite the turning point. To my knowledge, this is the first time in human history that a work of art has had to be euthanized.

For those worried about playing god: Yeah, we’ve been doing that for a while now. It’s gotten old enough that we don’t even bat an eye at how strange it is for someone to say “Iâ€™ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden Iâ€™m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…”
noen

markmarkmark
“Scientists made something from other things, which is not at all the same as making something from nothing, which is what was meant by “playing God.”"

I know, but creating a tiny model of a universe is sufficiently Godlike for me to consider it playing God. Which was my point.

“as a fellow who’s spent a good amount of time interacting with cattle, I have to say I’m almost absolutely sure that they aren’t concious”

Then you are confused about the meaning of words. Cattle are most certainly conscious and aware and sentient beings.

conscious:
“Knowing and perceiving; having awareness of surroundings and sensations and thoughts.”

sentient:
“Endowed with feeling and unstructured consciousness.”

Cattle meet all these criteria. They are simply not very intelligent. The animals that we kill for our food do not give themselves willingly. That is just how it is. A good deal of religion is about assuaging the guilt we feel for taking life. I think that is the proper attitude and how things should be.
UnderRat

@#15

I would imagine that yes, you would still be exploiting animals by harvesting their stem cells.
markmarkmark

i’m not arguing present realities but future possibilities.
yes, now it’s expensive and impactful but to say that over the next few decades we may not improve/streamline or increase the effeciency of the process.
in all honesty i don’t believe we’ll ever have mass produced vat grown meat, but i know that i can’t really know the future.

it’s still fun to imagine though.
markmarkmark

i’m sure lots of animals would be kep, but ducks and goats and those type of animals aren’t really domesticated as much as a cow or a pig – i’ve never in my life seen a feral herd of cows, but i’ve seen countless wild ducks.

but that’s not my point – i’m curious as to the ramifications of vat grown meat in that peta and animal rights activists protest meat eating because they view the slaughter of animals as needlessly cruel, or environmentally destructive, and in some cases they’re right, but is it ethical for people to treat animals in such a way that they become useless and as a result certain types of animals dissapear forever.

again, this is mostly just a thought experiment.