Michael Specter Quotes

Adult stem cells are also problematic, as they are difficult to identify, purify and grow, and simply may not exist for certain diseased tissues that need to be replaced.

If you think about brewing, it is biotechnology. And I would say that I was a technologist at heart. So whether I... fermented beer or whether I fermented enzymes, the base technology was the same.

There's just a certain fear that people have when they put meat coming out of a printer in their mouth.

The potential for synthetic biology and biotechnology is vast; we all have an opportunity to create the future together.

I'd like to see what fraction of things that chemists have figured out we could actually teach nature to do. Then we really could replace chemical factories with bacteria.

What I want to do is demonstrate that biology can learn how to make a vast array of molecules that people thought were outside the realm of biology.

We're seeing a move toward making things that either chemistry cannot make or can't make efficiently but biology does.

There are other dimensions of biotechnology. If you think of biotechnology like the Internet, it's not a category - it's an infrastructure that can be deployed to sustain or disrupt. In health care, the most complex problems at the high end have to be dealt with in a problem-solving mode by the best, most experienced physicians you can find.

We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.

[Our lab uses] a desktop inkjet printer, but instead of using ink, we're using cells.

Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.

Industrial opportunities are going to stem more from the biological sciences than from chemistry and physics. I see biology as being the greatest area of scientific breakthroughs in the next generation.

Some vegetarians and vegans may object to in vitro meat, because they don't see the need for meat at all. That's fine for them, and of course they are free to remain vegetarians and vegans and choose not to eat in vitro meat.

For scientists, growing cells took so much work that they couldn't get much research done. So the selling of cells was really just for the sake of science, and there weren't a lot of profits.

Biological engineering is not necessarily understanding systems but rather, I want to be able to design and build biological systems to perform particular applications.

I see, in the future, bioengineered almost everything you can imagine that we use.

If one of the arguments against eating meat is to do with cruelty and animal intelligence, then lab meat avoids that. There's also the environmental argument for it.

Stem cell research can revolutionize medicine, more than anything since antibiotics.

We need stem-cell research, no question about it. It is absolutely crucial for moving our medical science forward. We are trying to harness an untapped source of energy that can provide cures and possibly even prevent disease and suffering.

The cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that?

Stem cells are probably going to be extremely useful.

Bio-technology is the science of the future.

The biotechnology wave is similar to the information technology wave of the 1980s and 1990s.

Cell culture is a little like gardening. You sit and you look at cells, and then you see something and say, 'You know, that doesn't look right'.