If I Ate Lab-Grown Human Tissue or Organs, Would I Be Considered a Cannibal?
We realize you're asking hypothetically. If you're looking to indulge in the other, other white meat but can't stand the idea of society branding you a cannibal, this might be the loophole you're looking for. And there are plenty of dishes to choose from. Since winning a Popular Science Best of What's New Award in 2006 for the world's first artificially grown human-tissue replacement, Anthony Atala, the director of Wake Forest University's Institute for Regenerative Medicine, has been busy trying to cultivate more than 20 types of human tissue, including liver, kidneys, lungs, heart valves, skeletal muscle, erectile tissue and bone. Grown from cells harvested from patients, these tissues are as good as what you were born with. "In tissues that have been successfully implanted in humans, testing shows no discernible differences between the native tissue and the lab-engineered tissue," says Atala (who declined to speculate on what those tissues might...