The latest topical insights from Aberdeen musical sketch comedy team, The Flying Pigs.
Professor Hector Schlenk, senior researcher at the Bogton Institute for Public Engagement with Science
This week, I have been pondering a difficult local question sent to me via email, which was: “If they cloz all them liebarees, wont our litirusy levels colaps?” I had to inform the councillor who’d written to me that this was, indeed, quite likely.
However, I do not really feel qualified to talk on this topic, as my own favoured reading is so full of complex equations that it looks like a chicken has been dancing across the page.
And, speaking of chicken, I had a hankering for one after the latest food science news. When I was young lad, “food science” meant working out the prehensile strength of the plastic lunch boxes belonging to the bigger boys who gave me “wedgies” at break time, so that I might drill a small hole and fill their sandwiches with ink. And from such faltering steps did my scientific career progress.
But now, topping that, an Australian company has artificially grown a mammoth meatball – that is to say a ball of meat which is not only mammoth in size, but has been grown from actual woolly mammoth cells. Strewth, as I believe they say in the Antipodes. And gads min, as we say in Banffshire.
The company in question specialises in resurrecting lost species in this way, and their activities should surely generate two responses in any responsible scientist: a) amazement at the enormous potential of lab-grown meat to end world hunger, and b) absolute terror that they’ll try raptor burgers and we’ll end up with a real-life Jurassic Park scenario.
The large-scale production of meat is, of course, a problem, contributing to environmental damage and prolonging the current climate crisis. Fair dinkum, indeed! But is this the way to solve the issue?
I must confess that even I feel slightly queasy at the thought of consuming something “produced in electrified systems”, that has been mixed and matched from cells to replicate the taste of real meat. Folk may balk at the thought of eating something cultivated from some hideous chimera, unknown to nature.
A giant meatball made from flesh cultivated using the DNA of an extinct woolly mammoth was unveiled at Nemo, a science museum in the Netherlands https://t.co/vl4Piqnlt8 1/4 pic.twitter.com/sI9drGPcQY
— Reuters Science News (@ReutersScience) March 29, 2023
Plus, as mammoth meat has not been consumed for thousands of years, we have no idea how our immune systems would react. Those who have eaten from late-night eateries while stotting up Union Street may have some inkling, however.
Given the environment benefits of lab-grown meat cannot be denied, I have attempted to create my own at home. Using some DNA cells I dislodged from the seagull that dive-bombed me at lunchtime yesterday and stole my Ginsters pasty, combined with the high levels of protein found in a large block of blue cheese, I have moulded the resultant mass onto a homemade scaffold made of Meccano, which, lacking a suitable bioreactor, I simply stuck in the oven for six hours.
Truly, the world of modern food science is one of important discoveries and high risk – but it does make one very hungry whilst waiting for firemen to douse the flames in the kitchen after one’s cooker has exploded.
Shelley Shingles, showbiz correspondent and Miss Fetteresso 1983
OMG! OMG! OM actual G! I’ve been totes glued to the trial of the century (until Donald Trump’s in a few months – centuries is nae fit they wiz) which, thankfully, saw the world of celebrity triumph over the world of luxuriantly-coiffed chancers trying to make a fast buck.
I’m talking, of course, about Gwyneth Paltrow and her skiing accident case. Poor Gwyn had an unconscious coupling with some optometrist whilst she was carving shapes on the ski slopes, and he was trying to sue her for all the trauma and life-changing injuries she caused him. Injuries and trauma that totally spoiled the holidays he took to South America, Europe and Morocco after the accident.
The former Mrs Coldplay was having none of it, though, and she countersued the bold hero for $1. The jury reckoned Gwynny was the innocent party and ruled in her favour after a very short period of deliberation.
Gwyneth Paltrow whispered “I wish you well” to Dr. Sanderson, the man who sued her over ski crash, as she left the courtroom with her $1 victory. pic.twitter.com/4p176ec19d
— Pop Base (@PopBase) March 30, 2023
She kept her dignity, though, and when she left the courtroom, she bent down and whispered in the boyo’s lug. Which was a bit risky, as I half expected him to throw himself onto the grun and start rolling aboot like Ronaldo.
“I wish you well,” she said to him, afore heading hame to let her hair doon wi a multivitamin IV infusion and a gadsy celebratory candle. Classy. Classy, and nae in the least bit smug!
Of course, me and Gwyneth go way back. I first met her on the set of British romcom Sliding Doors, where she was playing the lead and I was playing “disinterested background diner in a restaurant”.
In one scene, we had to do several reshoots and Gwynny was getting a bit hot under the collar. Eventually, she came to my table and said: “Give us some of your water, love, my mouth feels like the floor of a bird’s cage.” Wise words from a lovely lady.
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