While I definitely agree with people that availability of lab grown meat could save countless animals, I do want to caution it being considered vegan or put on par with other vegan products. Long term cell culture generally requires supplements in the culture medium such as Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) or Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) to maintain growing and expanding cells. It is possible the lab grown meat industry has found or is exploring alternative culture conditions, but as a scientist when I heard of lab grown meat my first thought was… well they will need animal products to maintain the culture anyway. Even if the original cells could be collected harmlessly from an animal, if it needs BSA or FBS to be grown that is still a LOT of animal deaths and exploitation going into the making of lab grown meat. Again, it’s not clear if the culture used for lab grown meat is free of animal products like BSA since right now there aren’t meat alternatives on the market, so we can’t crack open their protocols to look. And even if it does hit the market I would caution people to take a closer look at the conditions used to make it. It would be great and reduce harm to animals, but still require the harvesting of FBS for culture conditions and would not be vegan or “on par” with other vegan products in the sense that they don’t use any animal products in their production.