Stem Cell Burger, anyone?

Dr Abe V Rotor

 Living with Nature School on Blog

Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid (People's School-on-Air) with Ms Melly C Tenorio

738 DZRB AM Band, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday

Burger revolution: farm meat to lab meat

Burger made from stem cells in the laboratory,

     it could be beef, pork, chicken, fish, 

and in many different combinations no single

     recipe can define, menus in array.

Stem cells are universal to all living things,

     plants the simplest, animals complex,

human ultimate, ethico-moral notwithstanding,

     but who can stop science, progress? 

Simple as seed germinating into stem and root,

     as zygote differentiating into tissues,

to organs, to systems, on to a complete being;

     from organelles to uni-celled protists.     

Analogy from simple to complex shows Nature

     at work, transferring life in patterns,

key to evolution's continuity and diversity -

     but these don't need man's intervention. 

Disobedience from the tree of knowledge persists,

     discovery by invention or serendipity,

man saw how a seed grows, an embryo forms,

     in vivo, in vitro, Eureka! 

If in test tube life grows, and tissue culture 

     replicates the mother, henceforth grow

stem cells harvested from the bone marrow,

     adipose, amniotic, umbilical - 

Would a mold make a bone, a heart, an eye,

     kidney? Or simpler, in situ - pronto!

it's bio-automation, two centuries after Ford;

     burgers in millions, nay in billions.  

Who cares about laboratory grown burgers
     to a hungry world, to teeming cities,
to slum dwellers, and – to affluence and fancy?
     It is hard to defect from the bandwagon.

Pavlov after all makes no exception, more so
     in consumerism, and Darwin’s
survival in fitness, and on the expense of others,
     is true from ancient to postmodern.

For why should man eat the bacteria in BT corn?
     The arctic flounder in tomato?
Daffodil in rice, human hormone in cow’s milk?
     Bio-pharmed plants, other Frankenfood?

Perhaps because he accepted coffeeless coffee,
     sugarless sugar, fatless fat;
sulfite, chromates, monosodium glutamates,
     irradiation, moieties and clones.

And now stem cell burgers, and other products
      from lab meat - today’s Green Revolution –
so why farm the land, raise cattle on the ranch,
     hunt down the endangered species?

When you can grow food in test tube
     from stem cells of endless source:
animal, plant, moneran and protist – and human -
     Stem cell burger, anyone?