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Animals as Chemical Factories

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Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#21

Post by MrMcCall »

082349872349872 wrote: post #13
amelius wrote: post #9

Humans also consume more meat than required to stay alive ... (Before anyone starts to make moral statements)

from the viewpoint of TFA, meat is a way to (very lossily!) harvest the solar input that goes (over summer months, anyway) into extensive grasslands (inedible by humans in its unbred state), and gather that over several years into a package which (no external refrigeration needed!) transports itself to market/slaughter.

and doing so so very, very deliciously, at that.

and no more B-12 shots needed.

(I'm not in any way against vegatarianism and eat rather little meat, most of it bird, but I know of the diffulties some people have with strictly vegetarian diets. At some point, I hope genetic engineering will figure out how to produce the requisite proteins, and our animals can roam free, fertilizing our fields with only sheep dogs to bother them.)

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#22

Post by wellix »

MrMcCall wrote: post #8
benchmarkist wrote: post #5

Yet another instance of how people view the biosphere as a resource to be exploited for their own monetary profit and short-term benefit. That type of logic and thinking is a dead end. I've never had a silk robe and I doubt I would be any better off if I did have one. I'd much prefer clean air, water, and unpoisoned land for growing nutritious food.

Well said, friend. That is an important aspect of the Way. We must be gentle with our mother Earth in order to compassionately harmonize with future generations' happiness. But what I really, really want is hemp clothing. When I was in Atlanta in the 90s, there was a hemp shop, where I bought the best jeans, shorts, and hats I've ever had. They got nothing but more comfortable over time, breathed excellently and neve…

Could it be that it is more sustainable to have them as blends?

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#23

Post by globular-toast »

082349872349872 wrote: post #13
amelius wrote: post #9

Humans also consume more meat than required to stay alive ... (Before anyone starts to make moral statements)

from the viewpoint of TFA, meat is a way to (very lossily!) harvest the solar input that goes (over summer months, anyway) into extensive grasslands (inedible by humans in its unbred state), and gather that over several years into a package which (no external refrigeration needed!) transports itself to market/slaughter.

That used to be true when a pig would feed an entire family for a year. You're about 100 years out of date if you think this is still the case.

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#24

Post by lblume »

daemonk wrote: post #4

Cell-free synthesis is the next step. Theres slow progress, but very interesting operational models if it works.

I once visited a lab near Berlin where they told me that cell-free synthesis is basically like cell-based synthesis, just that they kill the cells first and use what's inside. The major benefit, I was told, was that you don't have to keep the cells alive.

It sounds very odd at first glance but seems very fascinating to me (and I know way less about biology than I would like to), this idea of dissecting a system into its pieces because we know how to use the pieces in a superior way to the original system itself.

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#25

Post by wellix »

smt88 wrote: post #14
MrMcCall wrote: post #11

Note that this is another difference between we human beings and the rest of the animals. Yes, non-human animals can take advantage of other animals' chemical factories (ants' use of aphids' sugar excretions come to my mind), but only we human beings can use our abstract conceptual thinking ability and scientific process to discover the nature of nature's chemistry and then put that knowledge to use. After my first-g…

I first read about industrial use of spider silk literally 25 years ago in Discover Magazine. I'm going to assume it's just never going to make economic sense.

Could you elaborate on why you think so?

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#26

Post by AnotherGoodName »

MrMcCall wrote: post #11

Note that this is another difference between we human beings and the rest of the animals. Yes, non-human animals can take advantage of other animals' chemical factories (ants' use of aphids' sugar excretions come to my mind), but only we human beings can use our abstract conceptual thinking ability and scientific process to discover the nature of nature's chemistry and then put that knowledge to use. After my first-g…

To give some humility, we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years as a species and for most of that time we could not have done what you've stated above. Farming, cities, animal husbandry, etc. are very very new for homo sapiens.

You really can't use "thing humans do in modern times" as an indicator of the superiority of humans. For a start no individual human could do something like build an industrial process for exploitation anymore than an individual termite could build a city since no individual has all the knowledge required nor could they build that knowledge from scratch. If all it took was a singular individual and not a collective we would have achieved this much sooner in our history. Your aphid example is much closer to how humanity operates than you give it credit.

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#27

Post by tomohelix »

daemonk wrote: post #4

Cell-free synthesis is the next step. Theres slow progress, but very interesting operational models if it works.

I have strong doubt it will work. On paper we are just removing an arbitrary boundary that is the cell membrane/wall and combine trillions of cells together to form a giant cell. So it sounds very reasonable and attractive in engineering terms. But these are biological systems inherently designed/evolved to work in one special condition that is the cytoplasm of the host...

Any engineer would know the kind of troubles that can occur if we remove a critical principle of the original design that was there since the system's inception and is literally hardcoded on an operational/abstract level into the system's functions. Trying to fix that mess is unlikely to yield anything close to the original and requires manipulating techniques and knowledge highly intimate within the system.

And we know barely anything about the intimate and detail operation of the molecular structures inside a cell. We know the broad strokes. But ask any biochemist if they are confident of the entire reaction pathway of any enzymes down to the thermodynamics calculations associated with all conformational changes. Maybe you will find a dozen enzymes that we can describe at this detail.

And to optimize cell free synthesis, we would need to know of tens of thousands more. It is possible, but it isn't something I would expect to see soon unless there are major breakthroughs.

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#28

Post by kiba »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #26
MrMcCall wrote: post #11

Note that this is another difference between we human beings and the rest of the animals. Yes, non-human animals can take advantage of other animals' chemical factories (ants' use of aphids' sugar excretions come to my mind), but only we human beings can use our abstract conceptual thinking ability and scientific process to discover the nature of nature's chemistry and then put that knowledge to use. After my first-g…

To give some humility, we've been around for hundreds of thousands of years as a species and for most of that time we could not have done what you've stated above. Farming, cities, animal husbandry, etc. are very very new for homo sapiens. You really can't use "thing humans do in modern times" as an indicator of the superiority of humans. For a start no individual human could do something like build an industrial pro…

That is absolutely cool and amazing that we can do that though. Being able to build on the works of others I think is way more metal than having a single individual or a small group of individuals doing it.

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#29

Post by scythe »

MrMcCall wrote: post #11

Note that this is another difference between we human beings and the rest of the animals. Yes, non-human animals can take advantage of other animals' chemical factories (ants' use of aphids' sugar excretions come to my mind), but only we human beings can use our abstract conceptual thinking ability and scientific process to discover the nature of nature's chemistry and then put that knowledge to use. After my first-g…

The problem with spider silk is that it isn't just a chemical. We can make spider silk. There are plenty of papers where the spider silk proteins are produced by bacteria and spun into a fiber. The problem is that this fiber basically behaves like regular silk.

Spider silk is partially crystallized and partially amorphous in a semi-disordered pattern that maximizes the toughness of the finished product. The way the silk is slowly concentrated out of solution during spinning in the spinneret is crucial to obtaining the desired properties. There have been attempts to replicate this process, e.g.:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.2008033...

However, a scalable design is incredibly difficult to achieve. Frankly, I'd be happy if we could just make regular silk cheaper than the worm fiber.

Re: Animals as Chemical Factories

#30

Post by amelius »

082349872349872 wrote: post #13
amelius wrote: post #9

Humans also consume more meat than required to stay alive ... (Before anyone starts to make moral statements)

from the viewpoint of TFA, meat is a way to (very lossily!) harvest the solar input that goes (over summer months, anyway) into extensive grasslands (inedible by humans in its unbred state), and gather that over several years into a package which (no external refrigeration needed!) transports itself to market/slaughter.

Producing how much methane?
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